took a deep breath and stared at her reflection in the big round mirror above the counter. The slicked-back hair made her look strange and unfinished, like a just-hatched chick. “Maybe I’ll think better with short hair.”
She heard the hungry rasp of the heavy scissors and with the first snip, she knew the decision was irrevocable. A cool breeze touched her neck, and a lightness lifted her, as though nothing anchored her to earth.
At a Wal-Mart outside Davenport, she bought a velour jogging suit to sleep in. The zip-up jacket and elastic-waistband pants were the perfect togs for terrible-looking roadside motels with sleepy desk clerks who had to be summoned by a bell on the counter.
At the state line, she caromed into a new-and-used car dealership so vast that its lot covered acres.
The GTO would fetch a handsome price, more than enough for a more appropriate car. She wouldn’t miss the muscle car in the least and felt nothing when she explained that she wanted to trade it in. She had presented the car to Jack with so much love in her heart. Where had that love gone? Was it possible for it to simply disappear?
Poof, rubbed out like a mistake she made in her comic strip.
The question was, what car was appropriate? A car was a car, a way to go from point A to point B. All of a sudden, the issue seemed to matter. If she couldn’t pick out her own car, what hope did she have of mapping out her own future?
Her footsteps dogged by an overeager saleswoman named Doreen, she strolled the lot, trying to tune out Doreen’s constant, upbeat patter about the can’t-miss attributes of every car they passed. “Here’s a beauty,” she said, indicating an ultraconservative Mercury Sable. “That’s actually the same model I bought after my divorce.”
Sarah ducked her head and tried to resist hunching her shoulders. Had Doreen somehow guessed that she was fleeing her husband? Was she wearing the unwarranted shame like a scarlet letter on her chest? She nearly ditched Doreen then and there. But she needed wheels, and she needed them now. At least, Sarah thought, she wasn’t dealing with a guy wearing a plaid sport jacket and too much aftershave.
There was a slight reprieve when Doreen’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen and said, “Sorry. I’m afraid I have to take this.”
“You go right ahead,” Sarah said.
Doreen turned aside and lowered her voice. “Mommy’s busy,” she said. “What do you need?”
Sarah slowed her steps as if to check out a silver hybrid. In actuality, she was checking out Doreen, who had been transformed in seconds from yappy high-pressure salesperson to harried single mom. Overhearing Doreen trying to referee a sibling dispute on the phone, Sarah realized there were worse things than being divorced. Like being divorced with kids. What could be harder than that?
All right, she thought, Doreen would get a commission from her. She grew more serious about her search, but all the cars seemed the same—bland, practical, ordinary. When Doreen got off the phone, Sarah said, “You’ve got every car in the world here. And none of them seems right.”
“Why don’t you tell me a little more about what you’re looking for? Do you need four-wheel drive? A sports car…?”
The sodium vapor lights came on over the parking lot, buzzing to life in the late-afternoon twilight. Sarah thought about Doreen’s kids, waiting for her to come home from work.
“I’m leaving my husband,” she said, the words frosting the air, seeming to hang there a moment like a speech balloon from Shirl’s mouth. “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” For some reason, it helped to tell this stranger the truth. “It seems like I should have the right car. I want…I’m not sure.” She offered a self-deprecating smile. “Maybe I’m looking for a magic carpet. Or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With a drop top and a great sound system.”
Doreen didn’t bat an eye. “Hold that thought,” she said, and consulted her electronic inventory tracker. “We need to hurry.” Her voice was edged with urgency now. “This won’t last another five minutes.”
Mystified, Sarah followed her off the lot, back to a shop where cars were being prepped for market. “We’ve got a one-year waiting list for this. It was some woman’s dream car, but she traded it in after owning it for just a few months.”
They found a mechanic in an insulated jumpsuit under the hood of the cutest midnight-blue-and-silver car Sarah had ever seen. “You have a Mini,” she said.
Doreen beamed like a proud parent. “My first. It’s a Cooper S convertible—rare as hen’s teeth. I’m sure it’s promised to the top person on the waiting list but…gee…I just can’t seem to find that list, and I’d hate to bother someone at the dinner hour.”
They exchanged conspiratorial smiles. The little British-made car was adorable, like a windup toy. She could just hear Jack now, laughing and pointing out all the reasons a Mini Cooper wasn’t practical or safe. It was a passing trend, overpriced, prone to breakdowns, he would say.
“It’s perfect,” Sarah told Doreen. “But I have to ask, why did she trade it in?”
“Right after she bought it, she found out she was expecting her third child. You can probably fit a family of four in a Mini, but five would be stretching it.”
Plenty of room for me and my fax machine, Sarah thought.
“It’s got autolock, which is an antitheft feature. It doesn’t have OnStar, though,” Doreen admitted.
“That’s okay. I’ve never locked my keys in the car before, and I don’t plan to start. I don’t need a GPS, either. I know where I’m going.” An hour later, she drove it off the lot. The car was crowded to the rear with her stuff, and the sound system didn’t disappoint. She headed to the highway, darting up the on-ramp and merging into the stream of traffic headed west. In the middle lane, she suddenly found herself flanked by a pair of semis rising like steel walls and looming in close, ready to crush her. A terrible fear squeezed her heart. What the hell am I doing?
Sarah set her jaw and eased back on the accelerator, letting the trucks pull ahead. Then she turned up the radio and burst into song, “Shut Up and Drive” by Rihanna. She sang with a crushing sense of loss that mingled oddly with a terrifying exhilaration. She sang for the things she’d left behind. For a marriage she used to believe in, but didn’t anymore. For the hope of having a baby, which was now as dead as her love for Jack. For the anonymous woman who had ordered the Mini and then traded it in when she realized her life was about to change radically.
Sarah found the first of a series of cheap roadside motels and lay staring at the blank ceiling of her room and listening to the sound of the highway. This felt like someone else’s life, she thought, someone she didn’t recognize at all.
Sarah drove west, her new car like a tiny bluebottle fly, flashing across the prairies, past endless seas of alfalfa and dried corn and deep emerald-green winter rye. By the time she reached North Platte, Nebraska, she made a terrible admission to herself. She had not been happy in a long while. This was not sour grapes. Humbly grateful for Jack’s recovery, she had been afraid to voice her discontent. It would have seemed so petty and ungrateful. Instead, she had existed in a state that passed for happiness. Jack was well, they were financially comfortable, they lived in a lovely home in a nice neighborhood, they were trying to start a
