Page 98 of Roadrunner

Riley said nothing.

“He had a Porsche 911,” I said. “Fully restored. A Dino Ferrari from the sixties. Beautiful cars. Both of them. He left those in the garage and took my Jeep.” I looked at the window. “He blasted down the driveway and I ran after him barefoot. I was yelling at him from the street.”

The yard was quiet for a moment. Addy had stopped chasing Arthur and was pointing at something near the fence.

“What happened to it?” Riley said.

“He ran it into something,” I said. “They never told me exactly what. A barrier of some kind, on the highway. Whatever it was, he hit it at speed.” I stopped. “The Jeep took most of it. Which is probably why he survived as long as he did.”

Riley was very still.

“I’ve been told the frame is compromised,” I said. “That it’s not fixable. It looks—” I stopped again. My throat was doing something inconvenient. I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t expected to feel this much about a vehicle. “It’s unrecognizable,” I said. “Someone told me it looked like it had been dropped from a great height.”

A moment passed.

“It’s in a storage unit outside Monterey,” I said. “I couldn’t fit it in the moving truck and I couldn’t make myself sell it for scrap either, so I paid six more months on a unit and told myself I’d deal with it eventually. I put a tarp over it before I locked the door. I couldn’t look at it any longer than that.”

Riley turned from the window. He looked at me. “We’ve got a new member,” he said. “Jay. He came over from a club in New Mexico. Owns a body shop in Tucson.” He held my gaze. “He can fix anything.”

I looked at him.

“I want to go get it,” he said. “Let Jay look at it. See what he says.”

Something moved through me. Warm and sudden.

The Jeep.

I thought about the day I bought it. Eighteen years old. I’d driven it off the lot and immediately gone looking for something to climb with it.

I thought about the day it broke down in the desert.

I thought about a cloud of dust and a man on a motorcycle coming through it.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for a moment.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay I can get it?”

“Okay you can get it,” I said. “But it’s not really a Jeep anymore. It’s just mangled metal. Maybe you can make a monument.”

He went quiet. He turned back to the window.

I stood beside him and looked at the yard where Arthur was now explaining something to Addy with great seriousness.

I thought about the Jeep under the tarp.

I thought about what it would mean to have it back. Fixed and whole and parked in the driveway of a house in Marana.

I thought about everything that Jeep had carried. Every version of us it had held.

If we had the Jeep back, I thought, everything would be back.

Every piece of it.

He called Jay that same evening, sitting at Della’s kitchen table with the phone on speaker, giving him the year and the model and the vagueness of “significant frame damage” that was the most either of us actually knew.

“Can’t say anything without eyes on it,” Jay said, in the unhurried voice of a man who had heard worse descriptions of worse wrecks. “But frames aren’t magic. Most of the time they’re just very expensive metal.”