The Grand Marquis Across the Highway

He ran his hand along the fender. ” She drove it to the beauty shop and the grocery and the cemetery to put flowers on her husband, and that was about all. She quit driving in August. Her son brought it to me.”

“What are you asking?”

“Twenty-four hundred,” Merle said. “And that’s fair for what it is.”

I had nineteen hundred and fourteen dollars in savings and forty-one dollars in checking, and I knew both numbers without having to look, the way you know your own phone number.

“I’ve got nineteen hundred,” I said.

Merle did not answer that. He walked around the car slowly, and I walked with him.

He opened the driver’s door and the smell that came out was old upholstery and a little bit of a peppermint candy someone had dropped under the seat years ago.

The seats were a soft tan cloth with not one tear in them.

“Get in,” he said. “Start it.”

I got in. The seat was set way up close, the way a small old lady sets it, and I had to slide it back.

Merle handed me the key through the window. It was on a ring with a little plastic tag that said Arnold in ballpoint pen.

The engine turned over on the first try and settled into that low, even hum those big Fords and Mercurys have. It was the same sound as my grandpa’s.

I put both hands on the wheel and I sat there, and I am not ashamed to say I had to look out the side window for a minute.

“Take it down the road a mile and back,” Merle said. “Go on. It won’t bite.”

The Test Drive

I drove it east about a mile, past a hayfield and a church with a gravel lot and a little cemetery behind it, and turned around in the church drive and came back.

It floated over every bump in that road. The heater worked. The radio worked. The brakes were firm and did not pull.

When I came back into the lot, Merle was standing where I had left him with his hands in his pockets, and there was a woman with him in a cardigan, holding two Styrofoam cups of coffee.

That was Bev. She was small and round and had her hair set the old way, like she still went every Friday morning.

“Merle says you got left,” Bev said, and handed me a coffee like we had known each other forever.

“My husband,” I said. “Over money. It’s a long story.”

“They’re always long stories,” she said. “Drink that before it gets cold.”

I stood there between the two of them on that gravel with the coffee warming my hands, and I told them. Not all of it, but the bones.

The refund. Kaylee’s braces. Dusty in the jail for the fourth time. Jesse’s face when he reached across me to open that door.

Merle listened the whole way through without one word. Bev made a little sound in her throat when I got to the part about the braces.

“His brother,” Merle said when I finished. “How old?”

“Thirty-one.”

“And your husband pays to get him out every time.”

“Every time,” I said. “And every time, Dusty swears it’s the last.”

Merle looked across the highway at the gas station for a long while, at the pumps and the ice machine and the man in a work coat filling a gas can.

“I had a brother like that,” he said. “Bev knows. I got him out four or five times, way back. Mortgaged a tractor once to do it. It didn’t help him, and it about cost me her.” He nodded at Bev. “I don’t say that to tell you what to do. I just say it.”