The Car Keys in the Parking Lot

She held it out to me. Then she stopped with her hand in the air between us, and her chin started to shake.

“Sheila,” she said. “Do you know what Dad told me?”

“No,” I said.

“He said you didn’t want it anymore.” She swallowed. “He said you two were getting you something new, and the Equinox was just going to sit. He said it was the family car. He said you said it was okay.”

I stood there in that bright cold sun with my hand out.

“I didn’t know it was yours,” she said. “I swear, Sheila, I didn’t know. I thought it was his. I thought he was being nice.”

And before I could say anything, before I could even move, she stepped forward and pressed my key into my glove. She closed my fingers over it with her own hand.

Only then did she look at the blue car again.

“I can’t take that,” she said.

“You can,” I said.

“You don’t even like me.”

That one landed somewhere I did not expect. I had to look away for a second, at the snowbanks, at the sun flashing off the windshields.

“Brittany,” I said. “I never once didn’t like you. I thought you didn’t like me.”

She laughed, a wet, surprised laugh. “I didn’t know what to do with you,” she said. “You were always so…” She waved her hand. “Together. You always had everything handled. Mom said you thought you were better than us.”

“I’ve been driving your grandpa’s farm truck with no heat for four days,” I said. “I’ve got nothing handled.”

She laughed again, and this time she cried, too, right there in the parking lot. I did not know whether to hug her. I held out the Sentra key instead, and this time she took it.

“Why would you do this?” she asked. “After what he did?”

I thought about how to answer that. There were a lot of true answers. I picked the oldest one.

“When Jake was two,” I said, “his father left, and he took the car. I was thirty-two. I had a job at the nursing home in Marshfield and no way to get there. A woman from my church, Lorraine Olson, sold me her old Buick for one dollar. She said somebody did it for her once, and someday I’d do it for somebody.”

Brittany wiped her face with the back of her gray sleeve.

“I guess today’s someday,” I said.

I showed her the trunk before I left. The blanket, the scraper, the cables, the cat litter. She picked up the coffee can and turned it over in her hands and looked at me like I had handed her a museum piece.

“It’s for if you go in the ditch,” I said, and I showed her how the candle worked. “Crack the window a little bit. Not much. And call somebody.”

“Who?” she said.

“Me,” I said. “You can call me.”