He came out of the grocery store and into a blast of summer heat with four plastic bags hanging from his fingertips and another bag cradled in his arm because the cheap handle had snapped. It was full of little glass jars of baby food and he had almost lost the whole damn thing back inside the store. Runty little bag-boy had over packed everything. Baby food jars are light, by themselves, but toss a couple dozen into one bag and you're asking for trouble.
Maura called him at the car lot earlier in the afternoon and had given him a list of things to get for the birthday cookout they were throwing on Saturday. Kaitlin was a year old already. A year. Jesus. Russ wrote down everything that she told him to pick up, but then, typically, he left the list behind when he ducked out of work early, and then had to resort to his memory, which wasn't very good to begin with. He was sure he had forgotten something, and tried to figure out what is was as he crossed over toward his vehicle. It was the only car they had now since Maura had banged up the Rav4, and while he gritted his teeth against a bead of sweat that was tracking down the center of his back and making him itch, he thought that today would have been a good day to let her drive him into work so that she could have his car to get all this shit done on her own.
He was so distracted with the missing list and the sweat and the disintegrating plastic bag that he almost went to the wrong car. His was a dark blue Isuzu Rodeo, but there he was standing at the hatchback of a dark green Nissan Pathfinder, three cars down from his. He huffed through his nose, annoyed, and readjusted the bag that balanced between his forearm and chest. Half of the vehicles in this parking lot were SUV's, he realized--maybe even more than half. It was all anyone really bought anymore at his car lot.
With his one free thumb he began dipping into his pants pocket for the car keys, and that was when he saw, in the aisle directly across from his Rodeo, an old black Toyota Supra. At first he had merely glimpsed it from the corner of his eye, but immediately his whole head turned to look at it. Almost instinctively his eyes dropped to the rear bumper, where a remaining corner of a faded Boston Celtics sticker told him that, yes, he was looking at his old car, his first car.
He hadn't seen it in, what, almost ten years, maybe nine, but there was really never any doubt that it was his. Even before he looked for the bumper sticker, he knew. And though the paint was dull and there was a red pin stripe running not quite evenly down the sides of it, and though it was so diseased with brown rust that it looked kind of like a German Sheppard, he knew that he was looking at his very first car.
Even in the July heat he had to shake off a subtle chill that pattered down the back of his neck. Without taking his eyes off it, he crouched and eased the shopping bags onto the baking pavement at the rear of his car. Three or four baby jars rolled off his arm and, surprisingly, did not break. He turned his head down and scooped them up, stood them in a line next to the bags. Then he stood and went over to his old car, the stunned look on his face turning quickly into a big, goofy grin.
He loosened his tie and undid the top button of his work shirt--his sleeves were already rolled--then stepped around the old car in a wide circle, hands in his pockets, shaking his head in disbelief. It wasn't just the fact that he was now living in a town a good twenty minutes from the town he grew up in, it was more the fact that this car was still on the road that floored him. It was an '88 Supra. His older brother, Jimmy, had bought it almost new, a year old, right after high school graduation. Two years later, when Russ got his license at 17, Jimmy bought for himself a new Mustang and sold Russ the Supra for short money.
Back then it was the sharpest car at school. Most of the other guys were either driving their parents' cars to school or their own barely-running junk heaps, or else driving nothing at all and hitching rides or taking the bus. He used to park it along the tennis court fence, away from the other cars, paranoid that some idiot was going to bang his car door into it or something. It was so shiny black that it looked like, on bright days, that the sun was actually inside the car's paint, beaming out from within. The four chrome wheels made it glimmer even more, as did the chrome dual-exhaust tail pipes.
He cupped his hands around his eyes and put his forehead up against the driver's side glass. The leather bucket seats were dull and even looked a little cracked, age-cracks. Dirty gray duct tape patched the middle of the driver's seat, peeling away on one side in a brown curl and showing the dusty stuffing underneath. That hadn't been there before. There was also another cigarette burn on the black vinyl material that wrapped around the stick-shift, and that was new, too. Then he noticed that whoever owned the car now had put in a new stereo system and CD player. He had wanted to put a new system in it way back when but never had the money to get it done. This one looked pretty nice. The floor on the passenger side was littered with CD cases—Rob Zombie, The Offspring, Tool, Nine Inch Nails. He had heard of some of these guys but couldn't match them to any particular songs. Back then it was just a factory radio, not even a cassette player. He had thousands of tapes, too, that he listened to in his bedroom or on his Walkman. Whenever he rode along in someone else's car, he always appreciated the fact that they could actually listen to exactly what they wanted to listen to—just pop the tape in and crank it. Russ realized that his Rodeo had come with a CD player that he had never once used.
There was a white and blue garter hanging from the rear-view mirror. A lot of guys used to do that, hang their prom date's garter in their cars. Russ never did it because it would have distracted him and made him think about sex all the time, and he thought about sex enough as it was.
Which made him look into the back seat. The small back seat. He had lost his virginity back there, claustrophobic as that now sounded. It was with his first real girlfriend, Sara, who he had met during the first weeks of class at community college. He used to stare at her in the cafeteria, when he was sitting by himself in the morning eating cereal and she was sitting a few tables over with her friends. She used to glance over at him once in awhile but he thought it was because she could feel him gawking like an idiot. Whenever he got caught his face would burn red and he would look down into his cereal bowl.
One day he was standing behind her in line when she was trying to pay for a large hot chocolate that cost a buck fifteen. She didn't have the fifteen cents and Russ was quick to pull a clumsy handful of change out of his pocket. She started saying hi to him after that and from there they ended up studying together and then, miraculously, dating.
Russ picked his head up and watched a girl, probably early twenties, coming across the parking lot. He took a step back from the car, not wanting to get caught by the owner with his greasy face pressed up against the window. But this was not the owner; she passed by with a cell phone to her ear without so much as a glance his way. Nevertheless, Russ moved away from the car, backwards, looking again at the Celtics sticker that someone had tried to scrape off and then given up on. The license plate next to it looked all wrong, and he realized it was because it was not his license plate, his old one. 228-LSE. He still remembered it.
His heel kicked a baby food jar and he spun around, startled. He had forgotten for a moment that he was moving backwards. The jar rolled under the Rodeo, and he had to get down onto his hands and knees to retrieve it. But there was an oil smudge on the pavement and he didn't want to ruin his white shirt, so he got back up, brushed himself off, and loaded the grocery bags into the hatchback. When he came around to the side of the car he crouched down again and, reaching behind the rear wheel, grabbed the jar.
He fumbled with the door lock and then climbed inside, starting the engine. The A/C blasted in his face, warm at first, but quickly going cool and then cold. He adjusted it so that the vents faced down, so he would not get too cold too quick. The Supra hadn't had any A/C, that was for sure. Hottest car he ever sat in. He used to hang his head out the window like a dog, and Sara would tell him he was a freak.
He didn't go anywhere. He just sat there, adjusting the rear-view mirror so that it was aimed directly on the front end of the Supra. It was amazing how much had happened in or around that car. He guessed that was what happened when you had a girlfriend but no apartment, no privacy. He had listened to Sara tell him that she was falling in love with him when they were sitting in that car, and then, a week or so later, he had finally returned the sentiment. Again, it was in the car. They had held their screaming arguments in there as well, then made up, kissing and hugging. Every weekend he would flip back the bucket seats and clean out the McDonald's bags, random articles of clothing, school books, and occasional condom wrapper that had accumulated during the week. He practically lived in it.
He still had the same car and the same girlfriend when he finished his coursework at the community college. His plan had been to transfer over to Salem State, and in fact he was enrolled at Salem for the fall. But he was holding out because, the previous winter, Sara's parents had divorced and her mother had moved to a town outside of Raleigh, North Carolina and Sara's thirteen year-old sister had moved down there with her. Sara stayed up in Massachusetts with her Dad so she could finish school. In the spring Sara started sending out college applications to schools down there—University of North Carolina, NC State, even Duke just for the hell of it. Russ encouraged her but secretly hoped that she would get turned down by all of them and decide to stay up here and maybe go to Salem State with him.
But UNC had accepted her. Her plan was to ship some her things down there and then fly down the first week of August, but Russ nixed the idea by insisting that he drive her. And that's what they did. Took one final road trip, seven hours one day and six the next. The first day had been so full of conversation and laughter that they never even bothered to turn on the radio. The second day, though, was remarkably somber and quiet. They blamed the long ride, being tired, sick of sitting in the car. But Russ knew it was more than that. They both knew that today was the beginning of the end. Then he got a flat tire somewhere in the monotony of route 95 in Virginia, and while on his knees fighting with the rusted lug nuts Sara, standing on the hilly shoulder, took his picture. She was laughing and teasing him, trying to keep the mood light. Russ turned and pulled his faced into a big smile, then flipped his middle finger at the camera.
He stayed almost a full week down in Raleigh at her mother's new house and checked out Sara's new apartment in Chapel Hill. They said goodbye to one another on a warm and breezy afternoon the second week of August, their arms wrapped around each other against the hood of the Supra, gently brushing at each other's tears with their lips, making promises to each other that seemed unrealistic the moment he stepped away.
The worst part was stopping—that was when he felt most alone. She had made him a small cooler of sandwiches and sodas, and he was grateful for at least that. He did not want to stop. The blur of the pavement was good, kept the world a numbing blur. But then he pulled off the highway late that night at a cheap motel outside of Baltimore. The mattress was lumpy and smelled suspiciously of urine, and he could hear somebody snoring on the other side of the thin wall above his head. He turned the volume on the TV up in an attempt to block it out, as well as the whine of the big rigs darting down 95.
He was still awake at three-thirty in the morning, throat tight and a threat of tears stinging his sinuses. Swallowing dryly, he got up, stepped into his sneakers and left, relieved to be back on the blurry road, back in the comfort of the Supra's bucket seat, that familiar smell of the peach air freshener that Sara had been replacing every few months. He drove through the dark, toward the morning sun, headachy from a lack of sleep and from fighting his emotions, his eyes itchy and swollen. His mouth was dry and tasted sour, and his stomach rumbled, but he would not stop today. He needed to keep going.
He watched in the Rodeo's mirror two people coming across the parking lot and toward the Supra. One was a kid of about seventeen, eighteen, with an almost shaved head and what looked like pink-tinted sunglasses low on his nose. He was holding his girlfriend's hand, a petite thing with short, choppy hair who looked like she was too young to have a boyfriend. They broke apart as they came around the car to get into their respective sides, but even then held hands an extra step, arms outstretched, reluctant to let go of one another.
Russ bit absently on the inside of his cheek and watched the car gun into life, a quick cough of blue smoke kicking out of the exhaust pipes. Even with the Rodeo's windows up he could hear, even feel, the bass of the Supra's new stereo system. He held the jar of baby food in his hand, the one he had reached under the car to pick up. He passed it from palm to palm, watching the Supra jerk back out of the parking space too fast, sit for a moment perfectly framed in Russ's side mirror while the driver fought with the gearshift, and then, finally, slide away.
He continued to stare at the empty space for a long moment, until eventually a Ford Bronco took the spot. He found himself wondering if he still had that picture of him changing the tire and flipping the bird to the camera. It must have been buried somewhere in one of those boxes down in the cellar. Russ thought that he might, one of these days, see if he could dig it out.
The jar of baby food hit his thumb and fell into his lap. He picked it up and read the label. Peaches. Twisting the cap, it came open with that loud pop that he loved, and he brought it to his nose. Smelled like the Supra used to. There was a little glob of orange mush on the underside of the cap, and he touched his tongue to it. It tasted pretty good. Then he put the cap back on and slipped the jar into one of the bags, and shifted the car into drive. He pulled the Rodeo out of the parking space, reaching behind him blindly for the seat belt strap. His girls were at home, waiting for him.