Part 2: The Glove Box
I need to tell you about the night of our wedding.
Not the toast. Something else. Something I didn’t know about until that moment, sitting on my bed with my phone on speaker and my coffee going cold.
Ethan told it.
“After the toast,” he said. “After you went into the bathroom, Liv. Your mom went outside. To the parking lot. I saw her go. And I followed her.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“I was smoking,” my mother said quietly through the phone. “I quit in 1997. I bought a pack from the bartender. I hadn’t smoked in twenty-three years.”
“She was standing next to her car,” Ethan said. “That white Lexus. Crying. And I walked up to her, and I said, ‘Linda, can we talk?’ And she said…”
He stopped. He looked at the phone.
“Tell her what I said,” my mother whispered. “It’s all right. Tell her.”
Ethan took a breath.
“She said, ‘Mike was a mechanic too. Did she tell you that?’ And I said yes. And she said, ‘He was good. So good. Everybody loved him. And he worked himself to death under somebody else’s truck and left me with a seven-year-old and eleven thousand dollars of debt and a car I couldn’t afford to keep.’”
My mother made a small, broken sound.
“And she said, ‘Every time I look at you, I see him. Your hands. Your smile. The way you talk about engines. And I know how it ends. I know exactly how it ends. And I can’t watch my daughter go through what I went through.’”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“And then,” Ethan said, “she laughed. This awful laugh. And she said, ‘You want to prove me wrong? You want me to believe you’re different? Bring back Mike’s Chevelle. Bring it back running. Then I’ll believe a mechanic can do something besides break a woman’s heart.’”
He looked down at our hands.
“And then she threw her cigarette on the ground and went back inside,” he said. “And I stood there in that parking lot for a long time.”
“I was drunk,” my mother whispered. “I didn’t mean it. It was an impossible thing to ask. I said it because it was impossible. Because I knew nobody could ever do it.”
“I know,” Ethan said. “But I told you I’d remember.”
I’ll remember that.
That’s what he’d said at the reception. Raising his glass. Smiling at her.
I’d thought he meant the insult. I’d thought it was a quiet little threat. A promise to prove her wrong someday.
I didn’t know he was talking about the car.
“Five years,” I said. I was crying now. “You’ve been looking for my dad’s car for five years?”
“Three and a half, actually,” Ethan said. “It took me a year and a half to find it.”
“How?”
“You had a box,” he said. “In the closet at the old apartment. A shoebox. With your dad’s stuff in it. His watch. His Zippo. Some photographs.” He smiled a little. “And a registration card. From 1999. With the VIN number on it.”
I remembered the box. My mother gave it to me when I graduated high school. I’d looked through it once and put it away. I couldn’t bear to look at it.
“I ran the VIN,” Ethan said. “Every database I could find. Title records. Insurance records. DMV records in six states. Most of it was a dead end. Harold Pruitt never re-registered it. It just disappeared after 2001. Like it fell off the earth.”
“So how did you find it?” my mother asked. Her voice was steadier now. Just a little.
“Facebook,” Ethan said.
I actually laughed. Through the tears. “Facebook?”
“There’s a group,” Ethan said, a little embarrassed. “For Chevelle collectors. Forty thousand members. I posted the VIN and a picture from your shoebox. Your dad standing next to the car in 1995 with his arm around you, Linda. You’re wearing a yellow sundress.”
My mother made a sound on the phone.
“I remember that dress,” she whispered.
“Eighteen months,” Ethan said. “Nothing. Then one night, a guy named Bobby Pruitt messaged me. Harold’s grandson. He’d seen the post. He said his grandpa had a blue Chevelle in his barn in Paducah. Had been there since before Bobby was born. Nobody ever touched it. Grandpa always said he’d get to it someday.”
“And you bought it,” I said.
“I drove down to Paducah in March of year two. Remember? I said I was going to a parts auction.”
I remembered. He’d been gone two days. He came home with sunburn on his neck and a strange look on his face.
“I walked into that barn,” Ethan said. “And Bobby pulled the tarp off. And it was there. Rusted through in the floor pans. Raccoon nest in the back seat. Four flat tires. The engine seized. Mouse droppings in the glove box.” He laughed softly. “And it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Because I knew it was his. I knew it was the car you sat on, Liv. I could see it. I could see you sitting on that hood.”
“How much did you pay for it?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer right away.
“The coffee can,” he said finally.
I closed my eyes.
The coffee can. The Folgers can in the closet. Every Friday. Twenty dollars, fifty dollars. What’s the can for? The future.
“You told me that was for the shop,” I said.
“Half of it was,” Ethan said. “The other half was for this.”
“I restored it at the shop,” Ethan said. “After hours. Every night after the guys went home. Weekends. Three years. Mostly by myself. Rafael helped sometimes. And Teddy, when I needed somebody to hold a light.”
“The blue car,” I said slowly. “In bay three. Under the cover. You told me it was a customer’s car. A restoration job for some guy in Chesterfield.”
“I lied,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry. It’s the only time I’ve ever lied to you. I wanted it to be a surprise. I didn’t know if I could finish it. I didn’t want to promise you something I couldn’t deliver.”
My mother was crying again on the phone. Quietly this time.
“It runs?” she whispered. “Ethan. Does it run?”
“It runs, Linda,” Ethan said. “It runs like the day Mike finished it.”
I was sobbing now. Openly. Sitting on my bed in my pajamas with my coffee cold and my phone on speaker.
“Where is it?” I said. “Where’s the car?”
Ethan smiled.
“It’s in your mom’s driveway,” he said. “Teddy and Rafael drove it over at six this morning. They parked it, put the keys in the mailbox, and left the package on the porch. That’s why she called.”
“It’s in my driveway?” my mother said.
I heard her move. I heard a door open. I heard her breathing change.
And then, through the phone, I heard my mother scream.
Not a scared scream. Not an angry one.
A scream like she’d been holding it in for twenty-five years.
“We’re coming over,” Ethan said into the phone. “Linda? We’ll be there in twenty minutes. Is that okay?”
She couldn’t answer. I could hear her crying. Gasping.
“Mom,” I said. “Mom, we’re coming. Okay? We’re coming right now.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
I hung up. I looked at Ethan.
He sat on the edge of the bed with tears running down his face. He was trying to smile. He couldn’t quite manage it.
“I didn’t know if it was the right thing,” he said. “I’ve been terrified for three years. That it would hurt her. That it would make things worse. That she’d hate me even more.”
I threw my arms around his neck.
I couldn’t say anything. I just held him. I held him so tight I could feel his heart pounding against my chest.
“You crazy man,” I finally whispered into his shoulder. “You crazy, stubborn, wonderful man.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s the best thing.”
We drove over in Ethan’s truck. I didn’t even change out of my pajamas. I just pulled on a hoodie and sneakers and got in the truck.
My mother lives in a big brick colonial in Wildwood Estates. Two-car garage. Perfectly trimmed boxwoods along the front walk. A flagpole with an American flag.
We turned onto her street.
And there it was.
Parked in her circular driveway, in front of her white Lexus, gleaming in the October sun.
A 1969 Chevelle SS. Fathom Blue.
So dark it was almost black in the shade. But where the sun hit it, it turned the deep, rich blue of the ocean at night. The chrome bumpers shone like mirrors. The black vinyl top was perfect. The tires were new. The white stripes on the hood were crisp and clean.
It looked like it had just rolled off a showroom floor. It looked like 1969.
It looked exactly like I remembered.
And sitting on the curb next to it, in her bathrobe, was my mother.
I’d never seen my mother in a bathrobe outside the house. Not once. Not in thirty-two years. She doesn’t go to the mailbox without lipstick.
She sat on the curb with her knees pulled up to her chest, wearing a pink terrycloth robe and fuzzy slippers. Her hair was a mess. No makeup. Her face was swollen and red.
She held the key ring in both hands. A silver horseshoe. Two old keys.
When Ethan’s truck pulled up, she looked up.
I got out before the truck even stopped all the way. I ran to her. I didn’t think. I just ran.
She stood. And I threw my arms around my mother. And she held onto me. Hard. Harder than she’d held me since I was little.
“Olivia,” she kept saying. “Olivia. Olivia.”
“I know, Mom. I know.”
“It’s his car. It’s his car. It’s really his car.”
“I know.”
She pulled back. She held my face in both hands. The way she used to when I was a little girl with a scraped knee.
“I sold it,” she whispered. “I sold your father’s car to a stranger for thirty-two hundred dollars. I sold it for the funeral. I sold it because I couldn’t stand to look at it. I couldn’t stand to have it in the garage. Every time I opened the door, I’d see it, and I’d see him under it.” She was crying so hard she could barely talk. “I never told you. I never told you I sold it. You came home from school and asked where Daddy’s blue car went, and I told you it went to car heaven. You were seven. You believed me.”
“I remember,” I said. I did. I’d forgotten until that moment, but I remembered. Car heaven. “I used to think it was up there with him.”
My mother laughed. A horrible, wet, beautiful laugh.
“And now it’s back,” she said. “It came back.”
Ethan stood by the truck. He hadn’t come closer. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching us, the way he’d stood in the hallway outside the bathroom at our wedding. Waiting.
My mother looked up and saw him.
She let go of me. She walked across the driveway toward him. Slowly. In her pink bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.
She stopped right in front of him.
For a long moment, they just looked at each other.
My mother is five foot four. Ethan is six foot one. She had to tilt her head all the way back.
“There’s something in the glove box,” Ethan said quietly. “I didn’t put it in the package. I thought… I thought you should find it yourself.”
My mother stared at him.
“What is it?”
“Something I found,” Ethan said. “When I took the dash apart. In the second year. It was wedged up behind the glove box. Between the box and the firewall. Like it slipped down back there and got stuck.” He swallowed. “I didn’t read it, Linda. I swear. I saw the name on the envelope, and I put it right back. It’s not mine to read.”
My mother turned and looked at the car.
Then she walked over to it. She opened the passenger door. The hinges didn’t squeak. Ethan had oiled them.
She climbed in. She sat in the passenger seat. Black vinyl, brand new, but the same pattern. The same seat she’d sat in a thousand times in 1995.
She reached out with a shaking hand and opened the glove box.
Inside lay an envelope.
Old. Yellowed. Soft at the edges. The flap was still sealed.
On the front, in handwriting I’d never seen, slanted and messy, written in blue ballpoint pen:
Lindy.
My mother stared at it.
“Lindy,” she whispered. “He called me Lindy. Nobody’s called me Lindy since…”
She couldn’t finish.
She held the envelope in both hands for a long time.
“Mom,” I said softly. I’d come over to stand at the open car door. “You don’t have to open it now.”
“Yes, I do,” she said.
She slid her thumb under the flap. The old glue gave way easily. Twenty-five years old.
Inside was a single sheet of paper. Lined paper. Torn out of a spiral notebook. Folded in thirds.
And something else. Something small and heavy that slid out of the envelope and fell into her lap.
A coin. Bronze. About the size of a half dollar.
My mother picked it up and turned it over in her fingers. On one side, a triangle inside a circle. On the other side, in raised letters:
90 DAYS.
My mother stopped breathing.
“What is it?” I whispered.
My mother didn’t answer. She was staring at the coin in her palm.
Ethan came up behind me. He looked over my shoulder. When he saw the coin, he went very still.
“It’s a sobriety chip,” he said quietly. “From AA. Ninety days sober.”
My mother unfolded the letter.
Her hands shook so hard the paper rattled. She tried to read it. She couldn’t. She held it out to me.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t see. Read it to me. Please, Olivia. Read it to me.”
I took the letter.
I’d never seen my father’s handwriting before. Not really. Not more than a signature on a birthday card. It was messy and slanted and leaned hard to the right, like it was in a hurry to get somewhere.
It was dated at the top.
September 30, 2001.
My father died on October 3rd.
Three days later.
I read it out loud. Standing in my mother’s driveway. In my pajamas and hoodie. With my husband’s hand on my back and my mother sitting in my father’s car.
