CHAPTER FORTY
Alex
Now
We were at Della’s on a Sunday afternoon, a few months after we’d moved in, when Riley went serious on me.
It came without warning. One moment he was beside me at the window watching Addy chase Arthur around the backyard. The next moment the quality of the air beside me changed.
I know that sounds like nothing. It was something. After enough time with a person you learn the difference between their silences.
I looked at him.
He was looking at the yard. His jaw was set. He swallowed once.
“I need to ask you something,” he said.
My stomach dropped.
He turned to look at me. His eyes were serious in a way that made me want to take a step back and brace for something.
“Something I expected would’ve come up by now,” he said. “But it hasn’t. And it needs to.”
I said nothing. I waited.
“Where’s the Jeep?” he asked.
I stared at him.
He looked at me steadily. “The Jeep, Alex. Where is it?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
A knot in my chest. Something tightening. Quick and specific and surprising in its force.
“California,” I said. “It’s in California.”
“What’s it doing in California?”
I looked at the window. At the yard. At Arthur dodging Addy’s reach.
“Joshua took it,” I said. “The night he left. The night of the accident.”
Riley was quiet.
“We’d argued,” I said. “About the weekend. He wanted to golf and I wanted him home and it went the way those things went with us.” I pressed my lips together. “He left angry. He had three cars and a golf cart and he took my Jeep.” I paused. “Out of spite. Because he knew what it meant to me.”
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.”
“How do we get it here?” Riley asked.
“Flatbed,” Jay said. “I’ve got a guy. Let me get at him and see.”
Riley looked at me across the table while he said it, checking. I nodded, because some decisions you make once and don’t need to make again.
“Do it,” I said. “But don’t expect much.”
“You sure?” Riley asked.
“I’m sure,” I said. “I want you to see what’s left of it.”
He held my gaze a moment, like he was making sure that was really the sentence I meant, and then he told Jay to go ahead, and something in my chest that had been clenched since the night of the accident finally, slightly, let go.