A Little Hope(7)

“Yes,” Alex says. Greg holds his car keys and walks past the picture of Freddie and Addie, past the round table where he usually sits for meetings, and he can feel something has changed—maybe the sun outside has gone behind clouds, maybe the music in the hallway has gotten quieter. He can feel his boss watching him—as if he’s the applicant again and just had an interview—and he opens the door now and slips away.





3. Care Is Costly




Darcy Crowley will scold them later. She will get on the phone when she is back behind her desk, the invoices stacked on the filing shelf, the door closed so the seamstress won’t hear, so customers who come in won’t hear, and she will tear them down the strip, as her husband, Von, used to say.

She will let them have it. This afternoon. After coffee, after the stuffed tomato she’ll get for lunch. She will blot her face, she will take a breath, and they’ll be sorry.

But for now she stands outside the row of garages. Somewhere she hears the unmistakable chirp of a cardinal. The Open sign for Mercury Storage blinks on and off. There are about twenty parking bays in the lot, and she sees where the window to hers has been broken. The hole is large enough to hoist a slim person through. Why hers, out of all the garages?

She stands in the empty lot, and it’s so clean she could almost count the pebbles. It’s that time of year, she thinks. That perfect sun of October, the sky that feels as if nothing can happen. Down the street, she sees a woman come out of Dairy Land with two chocolate vanilla twist cones, and cars come by and then disappear around the sharp turn.

She shakes her head. Why didn’t someone tell them that windows were silly on garage doors? Glass is so fragile. They were asking for this.

This is a business, she will say, and you have a responsibility not to let things like this happen. Don’t people use cameras now? That’s how burglars are caught. That’s how her neighbors, the Ellersons, showed her a picture of a bear that visited in August. A damn bear, Von would have said. Right across their front grass like he owned the place.

She cannot not think of Von.

Ten years now. Ten years and that laugh—she can still hear its bounce, its echo.

His wavy hair, almost all gray, but with that trace of blond from when he was young—the hair they made him cut when he was in the service. His sloped back, his watch always ticking with its gold stretchy band. During that first year, how often she reached into the drawer to pull out his watch and wind it. How often she slid it around her small wrist (feeling selfish for not burying it with him). It would hang there and she would stare at the space between the watchband and her arm.

She can close her eyes and hear him talk. She often thinks of what he would have said. Is this a garage or a playground for criminals?

She had to be so tough. Taking over the dry cleaning place in her late fifties, when all her friends were retired or retiring, when she had hardly ever written a single check. The kids said she had enough money (the savings, Social Security, his pension), but she felt vulnerable. She got a business going she knew nothing about. She read for nights and nights about how dry cleaning worked, and how to outsource most of the cleaning and pressing services while still pulling in a nice profit.

She has had to stand up straight these ten years, pretend she has grit when she feels she has nothing.

She faces the keypad outside the garage and slowly punches in her code. The motor starts to hum, and the door lifts slowly. She feels as though she’s in a horror film, about to see something terrible. She holds her purse and hugs it against her body.

Her eyes adjust to the darkness. Her foot kicks a small piece of glass—probably one the garage people missed when they swept up the mess.

First, there is just dust, as there always is: dust on the headlights, dust on the hood with the swirl she made with her fingers the last time she was here. Dust on the tires that have lost their air, dust particles in the sun that peeks through the broken window. On the wall is an old poster she didn’t put there with a war bond slogan—Care Is Costly—featuring a soldier with a troubled expression, a bandage wrapped around his knee. She focuses on the car, and sees what they’ve done.

“Von,” she says, and her lips are so dry. “Your car.”

She walks over and touches the hood. Broken glass from the side window. I could have fixed that, she thinks. Glass is glass. But then she sees the gashes in the convertible top. Three gashes each at least six inches long. She walks closer. An empty Doritos bag inside, a cigarette burned into the leather seat. “Hoodlums,” she whispers.

She wants to promise Von she will fix it. She has learned from his dying that there is much she can do. She has also learned some things are unfixable. Which is this?

His 1964 Lancia. How he worshipped that car. It hardly left their own garage for twenty-five years. He would wash it weekly without fail, rub that special cream polish into its seats. He would get that flicker in his eye and say, “I think we’re taking Betsy out tonight,” and a Betsy night was always a better night. He would wear the aviator sunglasses he kept in the glove box, and he would smile when she’d take that scarf out of her purse and wrap it around her curls. “Ooh, the movie star’s with me.”

She never should have brought Betsy here. She failed Von by putting her into storage. She hiccups with guilt and makes a noise that sounds like a sob. She wants to find the people who did this. She wants to hold their shoulders, shake them and ask if they knew what kind of man her husband was.