The Grand Marquis Across the Highway

I took my purse off the floorboard and stood on the concrete and shut the door myself, gently, because I was not going to give him a slam to remember.

He backed out and pulled onto the highway and went west, not east. Back the way we had come. I watched until I could not hear the engine anymore.

Then I stood there by the air pump with my purse on my shoulder, in my red flannel shirt and my black puffer vest, and I looked at my phone, and I did the math on who I could call.

My sister Tammy lives eleven miles past our house in the other direction.

Coming to get me would have meant close to three hours of her Saturday and a tank of her gas, and she works doubles at the nursing home on Sundays.

My mother does not drive at night anymore. Our pastor would have come, and the whole church would have known by Wednesday supper.

I thought about every one of those calls, and I put the phone back in my vest pocket. I was done asking people to come and get me. I had been asking all day.

That is when I looked across the highway.

There was a little gravel lot over there that I had never once noticed in fourteen years of driving to Jean’s. A low block building with one window.

A few older cars nosed up toward the road, the kind of cars that get traded in by people who quit driving.

And out front of them, washed so clean it almost shone under that gray sky, sat a champagne-colored Mercury Grand Marquis.

My grandpa drove a Grand Marquis. He drove one until the day he could not see the road anymore, and he used to say it rode like a church pew on a cloud.

I had not thought about that in twenty years.

I looked both ways, twice, and I walked across that two-lane highway with my purse held tight against my side.

The Lot

The man who came out of the block building was old enough that I almost told him to sit back down.

He had white hair under a felt hat and wore suspenders over a plaid shirt, and he moved slow but steady, like a man who had decided long ago that hurrying never sold a car.

“Afternoon,” he said. “You look like somebody who just got some news.”

“I just got left,” I said. I had not meant to say it. It came right out of my mouth like it had been waiting there.

He stopped at the edge of the gravel and looked across the road at the gas station, then back at me. He did not ask by who. He just nodded slow.

“Well,” he said. “I’m Merle. Merle Fite. My wife Bev’s in the office with the heater going, and there’s coffee if you want it. You don’t have to buy a thing to drink my coffee.”

“I’m Amber,” I said. “And I might buy something.”

He tipped his head at the Marquis, because of course he had seen me looking at it from across the road.

“Oh-four,” he said. “Hundred and forty-one thousand miles. Belonged to a lady from our church, Mrs. Arnold.”