The Car Keys in the Parking Lot

He also gave me a plastic bag from the glove box. Inside were the owner’s manual, every oil change receipt for twenty-six years, and a little blue rosary.

“That was hers,” he said. “I don’t know if your girl is Catholic. Doesn’t matter. It’s been in that glove box since 1999. Seems wrong to take it out now.”

I said I would leave it right where it was.

Jake drove the Sentra home. I followed him in the farm truck, watching those little taillights in the dark the whole way, and I said a prayer for Marlys Brekke, whom I never met, and for her husband, who was going home to an empty house and an empty garage.

Saturday morning I was up before Greg. I went out to the driveway, where the Sentra sat in the driveway under an inch of fresh snow with the block heater cord plugged in, and I got it ready the way my dad got cars ready for my sisters and me.

A wool blanket from the cedar chest. A snow brush and an ice scraper. Jumper cables. A bag of kitty litter for traction. Two granola bars and a bottle of water that I knew would freeze, but that she could thaw on the dash.

And a coffee can. My dad always put one in our trunks: an empty coffee can with a fat candle, a book of matches and a few hard candies inside. If you slide into a ditch on a back road and have to wait for help, a candle in a coffee can will keep the inside of a car from going to ice.

I had not made one of those in thirty years. My hands remembered how.

I thought about leaving a note. I wrote three different ones on the back of an envelope and threw them all away. In the end I just put the bill of sale and the title in the glove box, next to Marlys Brekke’s rosary.

Jake came out in his pajama pants and his work coat. He looked at the coffee can in the trunk and smiled for the first time all week.

“Grandpa’s can,” he said.

“Grandpa’s can,” I said.

“You want me to come?”

“No,” I said. “This is between her and me.”

He nodded. He had checked the tire pressure again before I got up, and he had put a quart of oil in the trunk next to the cat litter. I had not asked him to. That is the kind of son he is when nobody is watching.

Greg was in the kitchen when I came back in for my purse. He was standing at the counter in his flannel shirt, waiting on the coffee maker, and he looked at my coat and then out the window at the blue car in the driveway.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“To get my car,” I said.

His face changed. I watched him start to say something and stop. Then he looked down at the floor.

“Sheila,” he said. “She needs that car to get to work.”