Karen’s habit was the hinge. She did not want her expensive car on the street. She wanted it in our garage, because our garage faced the center and because putting it there taught the block a lesson she liked. When she could not leave it inside overnight without a witness, she parked it so close to the garage door that the door could not finish opening and a car could not roll out. She called that staging. The code called the curb a public street. She had never once, in all her speeches about community, read the dedication.
We had been planning a trip to visit my wife’s family overseas. We had saved for two years. The trip was twenty-one days. We were set to leave in a little over a month. I did not tell the board we were leaving. I told the folder. I decided the month was an investment, not in revenge for its own sake, but in a demonstration the contract tower could not undo with a signature.
I started browsing the ordinary online marketplaces for the cheapest, homeliest, most undesirable cars that were still cars. I did not care about mileage. I did not care about the interior. I did not care about the paint, except to prefer paint that had already lost the argument. I cared about two things. A clean title. An engine that would start and drive a few miles without stranding my wife in an intersection. My wife, when I explained, was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “They have to be legal. If they are not legal, we become the story she wants.” I said they would be legal down to the insurance card. She said, “All right. I want the uglier one.”
It took a couple of weeks. The first champion was a heavily rusted bright teal minivan from the late nineties. The sliding door was permanently stuck. The back window was a map of duct tape. It smelled strongly of mildew and, underneath that, of the fast-food parking lot where the seller met me. He was a young man who needed the money for a security deposit and did not pretend the van was a secret gem. I bought it for six hundred dollars in cash. I drove it around the block before I paid. It started. It stopped. It signaled to the left if you held the lever up with a finger. That was enough.
The second was a massive sedan from the eighties, faded yellow, with a vinyl roof peeling off in strips like old bark. The muffler was half gone. It sounded like a tractor that had learned a second language and was still deciding whether to use it. Five hundred dollars. The seller was an older woman who said her brother had died and the car had sat under a carport. She asked what I wanted it for. I said street parking, which was true, and she laughed once, surprised, and told me not to be ashamed of a car that still went. I was not ashamed. I was specific.