Iris and Jacob slept with their backs to one another, as if even during dreams they were headed in opposite directions. As they were. She had nearly died. It seemed anachronistic—to be young still, or somewhat young, and to have such a bad heart.

Only a month after her last surgery Iris and her husband argued, which was a hopeful sign. Obviously Jacob thought she could defend herself. She was strong enough to stand up to him in the kitchen with the dishwasher hanging open and shooting steam. It was one of those tone-of voice spats: You sounded irritated and so now I’m going to sound irritated. During the argument she felt as if her ribs shifted. She had to sit down immediately—right on the floor.

She and Jacob didn’t fight after that. And now, how to explain that if she didn’t want to be touched it had nothing to do with him. Her body was a stranger. No, not a stranger. She would not be ashamed of a stranger. Of course it wasn’t logical, such shame. And maybe that’s why logic couldn’t do anything about her feelings.

It was a July morning when Iris’s sister Amy showed up with her twins. Amy probably thought she was on a mission of mercy.

A carnival, Amy said. Just like in the old days, she said. You have to come, Iris. I’ll be a wreck without you. Really. You’re doing me a favor, Iris.

It was hard to disappoint Amy—all that need written on her pretty, big-eyed, insanely vulnerable-looking face. Easier to please her than not to. Amy was the younger sister and wore the role without interruption. Oddly, Jacob never liked Amy and that, somehow, was reassuring. Amy was so pretty with her slow insinuating smile that years ago when Iris started dating it wasn’t at all unusual for anyone she brought home to stare frozen with admiration at her younger sister.

Amy’s boys, Michael and John, were dressed alike in denim shorts and white and blue t-shirts, and you couldn’t go for more than five minutes without one of them shoving his brother or locking his head under his arm. Just being around them you could break a bone. They were nine now, at an age where head-butting was regular behavior. Amy hardly noticed their acting up. Or else she seemed proud of how loud and disruptive they could be.

By the time the fairgrounds came into view Iris was furious with herself. So hard to stop pleasing Amy, although it was the path of least resistance in the long run. If Iris hadn’t come along today Amy would have showed up tomorrow with an even more preposterous idea: laser tag or skeet shooting.

They strolled past at least three double strollers, and Amy had to talk to the infant twins’ mothers, as if they all belonged to a secret society and were obligated to exchange code words. When the sky began to drizzle all the baby twins were tucked under clear plastic in their strollers, as if lodged in blister packs. Then the rain stopped and the wet patches on the walkways evaporated and strollers were unzipped.

The sun was fiercer than ever and Iris’s chest crawled with so much sweat that at first she thought an insect got under her blouse. Most of the carnival rides weren’t like the ones she and Amy went on when they were kids. These were serious. Apparently if you didn’t scream when you were on one something had to be wrong with you.

Amy knew better than to ask Iris to come with her and the boys on any of the rides. But then there was the funhouse.

Why can’t I just watch you guys? Iris asked when Amy invited her to join them. She was beginning to feel like a bad sport—and she wanted to support Amy, given that the twins kept whining, and the bigger one, Michael, asked why it was called a fun house when it didn’t look like fun and the shorter twin began echoing his brother. We can get out of the heat, Amy said.

Amy and the boys blundered ahead of Iris into the trailer. The twins were right, Iris thought. What’s fun about it? She was inside what amounted to a tight maze of glass and mirrors. Between smudged panes she could see children swarming with their hands out. The glass around Iris looked as if milk had dripped on it. Laughter, muffled, rose from somewhere to her left.

In the next channel she recognized one of the twins. He looked close enough to touch before she realized her mistake. His image was blurred behind thick sheets of glass and somehow a mirror was involved.

She set out again, holding her arms like a sleep-walker. She kept finding herself in the same steamy quadrangle with the same tiny handprints smeared over the glass. At last a skinny attendant in blue jeans led her out. There must have been cameras, she realized. The attendant must have seen her lean her head against the glass. Pain is like God, she thought—it’s not visible. Only its signs are, and then only to the faithful.

Outside the funhouse trailer Amy and the boys were waiting for her. Then the three of them went together on one more ride, and Iris hovered in the shade of a sausage truck. She was there long enough to remember one of the strangest summers of her life.

When she was thirteen Iris was hired to babysit a three-year-old boy during the day while his mother worked. And because the boy and his mother lived thirty miles away from Iris’s home she stayed at their apartment throughout the workweek. The little boy’s right arm was in a cast. He often tried to knock Iris with it. As if that wasn’t enough, she had to sleep in the same bed as the mother because the apartment was so small. The only time she’d been more miserable was two years earlier when her father died. But one day something miraculous happened while she was babysitting that boy. There was a carnival—a larger carnival than the one she was at now. The tents and the rides were set up on the edge of town, on a high hill. She and the little boy walked to the fair to look at the rides. Only to look: she didn’t have any money. Even now she can almost see herself. She must have weighed less than ninety pounds—a tiny girl in white shorts with pockets and in one of the pockets was the empty wallet she always carried. Because of a heavy downpour the hill was slippery with mud. Iris and the little boy kept sliding.

The sky was drizzling by the time they reached the top of the hill. No one was on the grounds except for the men who tended rides. Those men, all of them stringy and scary, wore shirts that looked as flimsy as tissue paper. One of the men—skinnier than any of them and nearly toothless—pestered Iris to buy a ticket to a ride. She stood there, mud splattered up her legs. The little boy was so terrified he clutched her hand. She told the man the truth: she didn’t have any money.

And then the miracle started. The man motioned for her to get inside a ride. She and the little boy climbed in, and the dragon boat rose and Iris and the boy could see off into the suddenly apricot-colored clouds. As they soared, the boy huddled close to Iris. Afterwards the man passed them on to other men who lifted the boy into ride after ride and told Iris to get in beside him. The men’s kindness was so startling and exhilarating and comforting. The thing that surprised her most: the men had treated her like a child. She hadn’t thought of herself as a child ever. She and the boy were together in this, but then, finally, reluctantly, because the mother was due home soon, the two of them began to float down the hill and into the town.

They were only blocks from the apartment when the little boy clambered up onto a stranger’s porch steps. Iris followed him and reached out to ease him away. She knew how he could swing his cast at her and shriek, but instead he turned and smiled up into her face. Just then a door banged open. An enormous man, like a bloated gray frog, rolled his wheelchair onto the porch. His mammoth head was sunk into his chest. He didn’t stop shouting even when Iris and the little boy bolted from the steps.

The boy—shock on his face, his legs trembling—would not let Iris carry him home. Nor would he forgive Iris after that. And then too, within a week, the boy’s mother set Iris up on a date with an orderly who worked at the hospital where she worked. The orderly was nineteen. The boy stopped coming around for Iris only after—his words—she “went catatonic” on him. She didn’t know what else to do, other than to stop moving, to stop talking, to pretend not to hear anything he said.

Amy appeared at Iris’s side, the boys right behind her. She announced that she wanted them all to go into the silly old-fashioned freak show. She and the boys had passed it when they went on the last ride. It looked cute, she said. Just one more thing. For the boys. Iris told herself, This is it. No more after this. Not even for Amy. Who was Amy these days, anyway? What made Amy kind and yet spoiled, tolerant and yet a busybody, vain and yet sloppy and late and smart and capable and self-deprecating and wildly in love with herself. Some women had a certain sort of power. It didn’t matter how they looked. They could be ninety years old and you still felt it. They’d joined forces with their own power. They might be surprised they had the power when they were girls, but after a while they learned how to make that power work in their favor, and to enjoy it. After a while they didn’t even feel separate from that sort of sexual power. They thought they and their bodies were one and the same. They didn’t recognize that there was a difference between themselves and their bodies, or if they did recognize the difference it was subtle enough to ignore. When Iris’s boyfriends looked at Amy all those years ago those boys thought they were seeing all of Amy. And Amy thought so too. But Iris knew that what they saw was separate from Amy-ness, the way a door isn’t the room it opens into. Or at least that’s what Iris hoped. Because if we are our bodies what is Iris? Hasn’t everything she’s endured taught her that her body has a life of its own and that she had the right to hate that fact?

Amy was actually remarrying her first husband in August. He knew what he was getting and wanted to get it again. And Amy believed he was the lucky one. For how long would Iris’s husband accept what Iris wouldn’t allow? He knew what he wasn’t going to get, and he still wasn’t going to get it. Gorilla Boy, The Cow with the Transparent Heart, The Three-Headed Pig, Snake Girl. The canvas signs were faded. Whole words were missing as if someone took a wire scrub brush to them.

Iris lowered her voice to warn Amy, The boys don’t look too impressed by the signs.

I know. We should have stuck with basic cable. They think they’ve seen everything. But it will be cooler in the tent.

And it was. The sides of the tent beat softly, buffeted by wind. The light was like what you’d find under a pink and orange parasol, and there was a smell of cut clover. Amy and the boys walked toward a raised platform while Iris paused just past the tent flaps, the shade calming her. For once, Iris had to admit that Amy’s idea was a good one.

She caught up with her sister and the boys yards ahead of her. They were alone in the tent—except for a middle-aged woman on the stage in front of them. The woman was turning in slow circles. Iris had seen a face like hers many times—at the pharmacy, touring through the mall, waiting in the doctor’s office. Even the haircut, the cropped helmet sprayed into place, was familiar.

What was different: the woman wore a lacy too-short dress that looked like an amputated bridal gown, and the backs of her giant thighs were rumbled and orange, like rind on expensive cheese. Gator woman, a sign said. Her skin didn’t look like alligator hide, not really. More like tree bark.

The taller twin—that was Michael—was staring, his face hardening. Iris followed his gaze to the woman’s sandals, the purple paint on the woman’s toenails.

When Iris looked up she felt the woman’s eyes on her, as if a fly stickily crawled over Iris’s face and traveled across her blouse and then down to her Capri pants that pinched Iris’s waist. Iris shook her head as if to make a fly go away, when what she wanted to do was to shake the woman’s eyes away.

Amy was busy brushing something out of one of the twin’s hair, and so at first she didn’t see that Iris took the brunt of the woman’s glare, took the full force and couldn’t look away. And it was Iris who could not keep from thinking that she herself was a cartoon monster, her body patched and sewn sloppily, her veins shining through her skin. It was as if Iris’s soul was being searched for by that woman—and her soul was in hiding, hiding from this woman on the stage. For Iris knew it. Someone loved the woman and desired her too. How else would this woman have the strength to stand, on exhibit, and yet to pour her stare, willful, unconquered, defiant, out beyond her body?

Jacob. He deserved better. Even before her first operation Iris was never accustomed to her own body, never entirely comfortable with it. Passing herself in mirrors on the street and not recognizing who she was. And she and Jacob—avoiding one another so often. What was the problem? She could not imagine what Jacob saw when he saw her body now, or she could imagine, and could not forgive her body.

If it would make a difference somehow, Iris was thinking, she would punish her own body for being weak, for making her breathless and stupid, for surprising her with failure, for establishing an agenda of its own—for not ever being beautiful, for being too slow and for being full of pain. For shattering and then shattering again. For never giving her a child. For making her husband draw back. For making her see him draw back.

It’s part of the act, Amy whispered. She told the twins it was time to leave, Aunt Iris is looking tired.

To her sister Amy whispered, I thought it would be—cuter? Fire swallowers. A bearded woman. Fat Lady. Cuddly types. Old fashioned. Like a drawing on a bag of cough drops. I’m stupid. I’ve scarred the boys for life. Stupid me.

At Applebee’s one of the twins shoved his head at his brother. Iris couldn’t even tell which twin it was. When the boys sat, they were the same height.

You hate my hair, don’t you, Amy said.

No—I just noticed how long it is, Iris said.

You think it looks funny.

I didn’t say that. It just—it looked like you must be hot when we were outside. I couldn’t stand long hair in this heat. Your hair looks really nice. You always look nice.

A grimace crossed Amy’s face before she said, I should just chop all of it off. Like yours.

The boys’ lemonade arrived. Crushed strawberries lined the glasses. Hairy livers, one of the twins said. The other twin pulled the straw from his drink and dribbled red liquid into his napkin.

Amy was talking: There’s a woman I work with—you don’t know her—she’s pregnant and she’s forty-three. Translation: there’s still time for you, Iris. And then Amy said, Are you all right? We shouldn’t have come. I’m really sorry. Stupid. I’m so stupid.

Gator woman, Iris said, laughing. Amy, picking up the cue, laughed too.

On the drive home the boys wrestled and got their seat belts tangled. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Amy twisted around and shouted so loudly that Iris turned too and cried out to the boys, No, and then, Stop it! She swatted at their thrashing legs. The twins stared, their eyes goggling.

Iris could have slapped their faces. She could have bent over the seat and clobbered both of them. How dare they wrestle like animals when Amy did everything in the world for them? Then too, Amy could have plowed into the car in front of them when she turned to scream at the boys before Iris herself started in on them. What was wrong with the twins—so rowdy and loud—and not so very young that they shouldn’t know better? A three-year-old would know better. Iris felt the way she did years ago when a group of kids on the bus picked on her little sister. Except now she wanted to swat Amy’s own children.

Her forehead was hot. Poor Amy, she thought, I can’t take care of you anymore.

She wouldn’t let Amy or the boys into the house. She assured her sister she was fine—she just had things to do before Jacob got home. Amy nodded. Poor Amy, whose eyes darkened, holding back tears. Iris almost missed the more annoying elements of her sister’s personality.

Iris lay on the couch. She pulled a blanket over her legs. She hoped she could make herself rest before Jacob got home. Try to be refreshed enough to be a good listener. She could give him that much, at any rate.

From where she was lying, Kippers’s rubber bone was visible under an armchair. Iris and Jacob had given up the dog—temporarily, supposedly, until Iris recovered. They both knew better. Jacob delivered the collie to one of his colleagues who had children. She and Jacob would never get Kippers back. The idea was idiotic to begin with. Kippers would be a loaner dog—to see if the colleague’s kids could be responsible for an animal before they got one of their own permanently. The real reason the dog was gone: Kippers kept jumping on Iris. The longer her recovery was taking, the more anxious Kippers had become, tripping her on her way into the kitchen, hurling his paws against her chest. Jacob was working such long hours that he was dead tired when he got home and didn’t feel like walking the dog. In other words, they’d come to the point where even a dog was too much.

The entire house was too much—the rubber bone looked furred with dust. When Iris and Amy were girls their mother made them get up before eight on Saturday mornings to help her clean the house, top to bottom. How Iris hated it. She wound up doing the dusting for Amy who always cried long enough to escape the ordeal. The experience had bred into Iris conflicting emotions—a distaste for housework and a heightened attentiveness to disorder. These days just putting dishes into the dishwasher got her panting.

As if from a distant planet the phone rang. It must be Jacob. He would be the only one likely to call at this time—if he was going to be late getting back. He must have taken the first-floor phone out of its charger and forgotten it on the second floor.

She threw back the blanket and headed up. It felt like there were several more steps on the stairs than she remembered. Maybe it was an illusion, but telephones did sound different if something was urgent. By the time she got to the dresser and picked up the phone no one responded to her breathless hello. The phone felt cold in her hand. She was tempted to lie on the bed, but she wanted to be in the living room—to come immediately to Jacob when he let himself into the house. She made her way downstairs, leaning into the banister.

She lay on the couch again. She drew the blanket over her legs.

The sensation started: an electric wire under her lungs. Every time she breathed she felt sliced. Like a diabolical force from outside herself, like some crazy stranger bending over her with a hot electric wire. After an eternity the torture passed.

A breeze lifted strands of her hair from around her forehead, fronds of hair shifting with the breeze. She could feel herself climb a hill, her legs wet from the grass, her dress tissuey with moisture.

She was climbing higher and higher. She wasn’t even aware of her breathing. How easy it was. Her feet didn’t hit against gravel or slide. There was no pain in her legs, no strain. Rain streamed around her—like no rain she had ever experienced. The wetness was soft, and then she felt as if her skin was being gently pulled and folded back. She was pushing her face into a warm towel that appeared out of nowhere and then the towel fell away to nothing. The lids of her eyes closed, and yet she could still see.

Her dying was precious, a secret. She wasn’t pitying herself in any manner she could have imagined. Instead, her clarified spirit mourned for her body—her body lying on the couch where the blanket had fallen away, her hands cooling, her faithful body that had only asked for her love in return—for its own life too. Her lonely body. She mourned, too, for her husband’s body. His lonely body. She mourned for her husband’s living body and her own body as if she were the villain newly aware of and repentant for an unforgivable crime. She wept for how she had kept two lovers apart.

It took several days before anyone answered Lanie’s Craigslist ad, and even by the end of the week, she had received only two responses.  Summoning the courage to reply cost her the lion’s share of the next week, during which she lied to herself hourly that choosing between the two respondents was what caused her to drag her feet––she didn’t wish to disappoint either one––but in darker, more honest moments, she knew better.  After all, placing the ad in the first place had required nearly a month of focused effort.

WANTED: Private mechanic to restore 1972 Chevrolet Impala.  Must work at residence, in or next to two-car garage.  Impala is in excellent condition but has not been driven for over thirty years.  Tires are very flat.  Will pay expenses plus negotiable fee per hour.  Email only to Ms. Hastings.

Of the two replies, the one signed “Gary” was friendlier and longer.  Gary said he looked forward to meeting her and making her Impala “run like a dream,” which sounded vaguely sexual.  The second response was terse but clear: “Always loved old Impalas.  No problem working at your place.  Buddy.”  Buddy got the job.

Alerting Buddy to this news cost Lanie a nervous evening of composing and then erasing email replies.  Sheer exhaustion finally forced her to hit send on a draft that surely was all wrong, but next morning, like magic, a reply awaited her eager fingers. Buddy agreed to stop by the following Saturday morning.  “Shoot me your address,” read Buddy’s email, “and I’ll be there.”

His sudden and impending proximity nearly undid her.  It was as if she’d engaged in a forbidden rite and had summoned something inexorable; he would be there, at her doorstep, possibly even if she withheld her address.  The enormity of his vow––Saturday morning, ten o’clock––sent Lanie scurrying to the living room, where she scooped up Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion, curled into the maroon armchair, and remained there for the next two hours, focused so desperately on the book that she careened through nearly a hundred pages without taking in a single word of what she’d read.  Beyond the calming picture window, the ravine and its May-greened redbuds, maple, and sycamore, gradually calmed and soothed her, drowsing her toward a crook-necked sleep and a dropped book.  When she awoke, Saturday was still days away, and she felt prepared at last to prepare.

When the big day finally arrived, Lanie dressed sensibly, made very sure her silk scarf was not too tight over her hair, and added lipstick––just a touch, and not too bright.  Then she sat in the parlor, knees together and spine straight, and kept watch over the long snaking driveway. She felt as if at any moment she would throw up all over her spotless black pumps.

Buddy made his appearance exactly as the hallway clock, a grandfather, struck ten.  He drove not a sedan or a pickup, as she’d imagined he would, but a behemoth of a tow-truck, its silver flatbed positively gleaming in the misty yellow sunlight.  Indeed, she thought she had never seen such a spotless truck, and as it crawled along the drive, Lanie had the distinct sensation, enhanced by the frame of the window, that she was watching a commercial being filmed in her own front yard, an air-brushed diversion that lacked only a soundtrack to complete the effect.

Buddy parked his tow-truck well shy of the garage––wise, she thought; he knew he might have to leave space for the Impala––and she watched him get out, hitch up his jeans, then hitch them up again, then pat each of his many pockets (shirt and jeans both) no less than three times each.  What, she wondered, was he checking for?  The motions he made were rhythmic, practiced, and the sequence never varied.  When he was done with his pockets, he hitched up his jeans again and reopened the cab door, made certain it wasn’t locked, and closed it.  Then he went through the entire process a second time.

Lanie stared, fascinated, holding her breath as if she were watching a tightrope walker performing without a net.  Only when Buddy at last set off for her door did she let her lungs fill properly, and the doorbell, when it rang, made her jump halfway out of her skin.  She hurriedly smoothed her raincoat and her slacks, pushed quickly at her hair, and nearly forgot to slap on her sunglasses.  Then she flew across the room to answer the door, newly and unreasonably terrified that Buddy the mechanic might in that brief interval have given up and left.

The door did not want to open––she couldn’t recall the last time she had opened it––and it required such a tug that when at last she got it free, she stumbled.  But at least her guest hadn’t run away.  There he stood, planted on the far side of the storm door and looking short thanks to the stoop’s two concrete steps. 

Buddy Halloran and Lanie Hastings surveyed one another in silence.  Both had rehearsed what to say, yet neither spoke.  For his part, Buddy stared because the woman on the far side of the door, the one who’d nearly tripped over her own feet, was a dead ringer for a petite version of Marilyn Monroe.  She didn’t actually look like Marilyn, not a bit, but in terms of presentation––the head scarf with wisps of blonde tufting out from beneath, the enveloping black glasses, the sheer wraparound raincoat––she was a 1960 newsreel brought to life.   

The effect was entirely disconcerting, and it took a sturdy push for Buddy to marshal his forces and offer a single-word greeting: “Mornin’.”  Almost as an afterthought, he touched the bill of his cap.  “I hear you’ve got a sick Chevy.”

She nodded quickly, as if that diagnosis might catch a killer or guarantee some fairy-tale ending, and she kept her eyes on the ground, at a point halfway between their mutually awkward feet.  She caught a faint whiff of motor oil: Buddy, or, more precisely, his navy coveralls.  To her surprise, she didn’t find the scent unpleasant.

“Well,” said Buddy, wondering if perhaps his host was mute, “you are Ms. Hastings, right?”

“Lanie,” she breathed.  A whisper, a cry.

“Okay.  Well, I’m Buddy.  How about I meet you ‘round by the garage?  That way I don’t have to track my boots all over your floors.”

Grateful, relieved––terrified?  He couldn’t be sure––she was closing the door before he’d halfway finished speaking.

The garage door slid upward, complaining and rumbling.  Once it was high enough to reveal the Impala, Buddy let out a whistle, and one hand strayed to the top of his head, where it remained there, pressing down hard as if a wind were about to blow off his hat.  He’d expected a junker, the proverbial rusty bucket of bolts, but the car that faced him looked as close to pristine as any vehicle of its age that he’d ever encountered.  It wasn’t even dusty (he didn’t know it at the time, but Lanie had pulled away its protective tarpaulin that very morning).

“Do you like it?” said Lanie, from the garage door, her gaze again aimed down.

“Like it?” Buddy said, half spluttering.  “She’s gorgeous.  And man!  Is she yellow, or what?”

The Impala was, indeed, unremittingly yellow.  Yellow like an unblemished and perfectly ripe banana.  Yellow like a canary.  Yellow like a prize-winning full-bloom daffodil, a world champ in the catbird category of Best Yellow.

“My father brought it from Arkansas,” said Lanie, her voice tentative, her gaze still pinning the floor.  “He said the Rolling Stones used to drive it.  I don’t know if that’s true, but it might be.  My father’s stories––some were true, some weren’t.  But I like to imagine it.  This big Chevy, full of rock stars, hurtling down the highway.  And if that did happen, well, I’m sure the car remembers.  In its way.  A memory stored someplace under the hood, or in the chrome.”

Buddy hitched up his jeans and patted down his pockets, three times each.  Lanie watched, her expression inscrutable behind her glasses.  She said, as he was finishing, “Would you mind stepping inside so I can close the door?”

“The garage door, y’mean?”

“Exactly.” 

He noticed that she had her head tilted away from the door, as if sunlight hurt her eyes, and her discomfort hurt him in turn.  He stepped quickly over the sill, and Lanie pressed the button to lower the door.  As it clanked its way down, he began a methodical tour of the Impala.  He opened the trunk and poked around.  He spent a long time under the hood, where, with efficient movements, his thick, grimy fingers clipped a voltmeter to the battery.  He pried off a hubcap and shone a penlight at the brake drum.  He sat in each seat in turn, examining the seat belts and testing the locks. 

Lanie remained in the kitchen doorway, her fascination growing.  Whenever Buddy moved to a new position, he hitched up his jeans and patted each pocket.  After checking the oil (without even thinking about it, he wiped the dipstick on his coveralls), he looked up at Lanie and said, “Battery’s dead.”

“Oh.  I should have thought of that.”

“No, no worries.  I knew what kind of car I was dealing with, so I brought one along.  You want to maybe open the door again?”

For a fleeting instant, he thought she might refuse––that she was a psychopath who’d lured him here, trapped him, and had no intentions of letting him go––but then she pressed the button and the garage door forced itself once more into reluctant action.  A pulse of sunlight beamed off the floor, and Lanie turned away, shielding her eyes with one cupped hand.

“Be right back,” said Buddy.  “Don’t go nowheres.”

True to his word, he was back in the proverbial jiffy––he hurried intentionally, surprising himself with his own willingness to hustle not for his sake, but for hers––and it took him only a few minutes to unseat the original battery and install the replacement.  He also brought with him a portable compressor, and after plugging it in, he soon had the tires inflated to their factory specified pressure.

“Bingo,” he said, as he twisted the tiny black cap on the last tire’s valve.  “You got the keys?”

“I do, yes.  Just a moment.”

He watched her disappear into the house, puzzled.  He wasn’t a history buff (except for cars), but he had to admit that she cut a striking figure.  What with the car and her clothes, he could almost believe that for so long as he remained in the garage, he’d traveled back in time, a leap of forty years or more.  He’d never been a Marilyn fan, no, but still.  This Hastings woman made it hard to draw a breath.

Lanie reappeared in the door, the keys pinched delicately between finger and thumb.  “Here you are.”

“Thanks.”

Before getting into the Impala, Buddy hitched up his jeans and patted his pockets, once, twice, three times.  Satisfied, he slid behind the wheel and inserted the key in the ignition.  It turned with arthritic reluctance, but turn it did.  The Impala hesitated, coughed, and thrummed to life.

“Heh,” said Buddy, patting the steering wheel affectionately.  “There’s my good girl.”  Looking to Lanie, he jerked a thumb at the garage door, which she’d once again closed.  “Want to take her out?  Take a spin?”

“No, thank you.”

Buddy considered.  “Can’t just turn her off.  It’ll drain the battery, even a nice new one.  You want me to drive her?”

Lanie shook her head, not because she thought he’d steal the car, but because she didn’t want him to go, an epiphany that forced her hands to suddenly clasp, the fingers intertwining hard enough to bleach each knuckle white.

“Well,” Buddy said, “okay.  I’ll just let ‘er idle a bit.  But you got to open the door, let the monoxide out.”

As Lanie’s finger hovered over the button for the garage door, she said, “Is that all it needed?  A battery?”

“I’m gonna change out the oil and the coolant.  Replace most of the belts, they can get kinda corroded even just sittin’ around, you know?”

“All right,” said Lanie.  “You do whatever you think needs doing.  I’ll wait inside.”  The garage door again trundled upward, and daylight surged through its widening mouth.  Lanie, without another word, vanished into the house.

Much later, as she was heating leftover lentil soup on the stovetop, she heard him knock on the door.  After turning the heat off on the burner, she donned her sunglasses and opened up.  There was Buddy, backed by the yellow-forever Impala.  She noted that the garage door was again down; had Buddy done that, just for her?

“I’m all done,” he said.  “She’s a beauty, and hardly needed a thing, really.”

Lanie nodded solemnly.  “Yes.  She’s quite a car.”

“You never drive her.”  It wasn’t a question.

“No.”

“How long you reckon it’s been since she’s been out?  Driven someplace, I mean?”

How long?  Lanie truly didn’t know.  The whole question made her feel light inside, unpleasantly insubstantial.

“I really couldn’t…,” she began, and then did something she never would have predicted: she told the truth.  “The fact is, Mr. Halloran, I don’t get out much.  I don’t drive.  I don’t even have a license.  I haven’t left this house in nearly fifteen years.”

Buddy accepted this with a pensive expression and a nodding head.

“Technically,” Lanie went on, “I have what used to be called agoraphobia.  Among other things.” 

She abruptly stopped, suddenly fearful that she’d just implied she contained an infinite onion’s worth of troubles and peculiarity.  

Buddy, however, remained unfazed.  “How long’s it been since you even sat in this car?”

“I don’t understand.”

Buddy hitched up his jeans and began patting his pockets.  “Let me take you for a drive.  We don’t have to go nowhere.  We’d just sit.  It’d be pretend, like.”

“You’re serious.”

With his hands busy at his pockets, Buddy grinned.  “That’s a gorgeous car, ma’am. Shame to just leave her there empty all the time.  And we’ll have to open the door, sure, but look, she’s parked nose-in, so you’d be facing the wall the whole time.”

Her own smile, encompassing and amused, caught Lanie entirely by surprise.  “All right,” she said.  “Let’s try it.”

She walked self-consciously to the passenger door, while Buddy let himself in on the driver’s side.  Once there, he pushed down the lock, hauled it up again, and depressed it once more for good measure.

“Gotta be sure,” he said, as Lanie slipped into the seat beside him.  “Slows me down some, you know, but.  Like I say.  Gotta be sure.”

Lanie felt it best to agree.

“Where to?” asked Buddy.

After a moment of consideration, Lanie said, “Perhaps just around by the river and back.  I do have lunch on the stove.”

“Right,” said Buddy, and he mimed shifting the lever on the steering column and putting the Impala in gear.  “Here we go.”

They had a very pleasant ride.  It was, after all, a very fine day: mild temperatures, hazy sunshine, a capricious breeze.  The dogwoods were still in bloom, and in the many yards they didn’t pass, the Dutch iris and peonies were bursting into flower.  The world smelled of mulch and freshly turned soil; the racket of distant lawnmowers sounded from every unseen block.

When the drive ended, Buddy sat back in his seat and smiled contentedly.  “Well, now,” he said.  “If that don’t beat all.”

“That was very nice,” Lanie ventured.  “Thank you.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.  My pleasure.  Although, and I hope you don’t mind my askin’, given how things are and all, why’d you want to get this old girl fixed up?  You lookin’ to sell?”

“Maybe,” Lanie said, “one day.  But not yet.  My father asked me to keep good care of the car, and I’ve been putting it off and putting it off…and now, well.  I’m honoring his request.”

Buddy’s glacial nod served as both acceptance and benediction.

Lanie put a hand on the door, intending to let herself out.  “What do I owe you for your work?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that.  I’ll send a bill.”

But he didn’t.  For a week, Lanie carefully checked what mail tumbled through her slot, a papery spill of invaders from the outside world, but no bill ever arrived from Halloran Auto Body and Repair.  Perturbed and puzzled, she composed a new email.

“Dear Mr. Halloran.  I so appreciate your work on my Impala, but I know you installed new parts, and I cannot possibly let you pay for these yourself.  Please do me the courtesy of sending a bill, one that includes an appropriate charge for your labor, so that I may pay you for your work and your time.  Sincerely, Lanie.”

She pressed “send” with trembling fingers.  Once again, the outside world seemed all too present, and she spent the remainder of the day curled in her chair.  She turned in early, and spent the night cossetted but tossing beneath the bedclothes.

Early the next morning, she forced herself to check her inbox.  Five messages awaited, three of them junk.  Also present was a note from one of her online book group members complaining about their latest title, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, which had of course been Lanie’s choice.  Below that was a message from Buddy.

“You dont owe me a penny,” read the note, “but I see how that could be awkward.  How about we go for another drive and call it even Steven?  Yours, Buddy.”

As she watched, tingling, a new message arrived, also from Buddy.  “P.S. – I’m really glad to know your first name.  Lanie.  I like that name a lot.  Best, Buddy.”

At this, she took a step back from the keyboard.  Buddy was online right this second.  If she wrote back immediately, he would very likely see her reply at once.  It would be like––what did they call it now?  “Chatting.”  That thing her book group friends did with Skype.

Her mouth went dry, and she clapped a hand over it.  She went to the kitchen and leaned over the sink.  She got a glass from the strainer, filled it with water, and took a constitutional swallow.

“Lanie,” she said, aloud.  “Get ahold of yourself.  It’s an email.”

Toward midday, after a cheerful two hours spent with Emily Dickinson, she summoned the courage to respond.

“A drive sounds like a fine idea,” she wrote. “Perhaps on the weekend again?  Saturday at ten?”

When he arrived this time, he was wearing a pale blue button down, a black sport jacket, and chinos, the kind that even a smidgen of spilled food would stain forever.  She’d been picturing him all week, of course––which was tricky, he had a pudgy, malleable sort of face––but divorced from his work clothes, she barely recognized him.  He’d eschewed his hat, as well, revealing a round head and a field of close-cropped hair that reminded her, thrillingly, of peach fuzz.  Why should that thrill?  She didn’t know.  She didn’t care.

“I’ll open up,” she said, meaning the garage, and as always when navigating the perils of her open door, she kept her eyes well away from the horizon line.  “I won’t be a moment.”

On this drive, they went farther, out of town and into Marion County.  Buddy wanted to show Lanie the old Traders Point covered bridge.  When they got there, he fished a few discolored snapshots out of his jacket pocket and handed them to Lanie.

“She’s a tough old girl,” he said, as Lanie studied the photos of the overgrown, vine-smothered bridge.  “Doesn’t even cross anything, not anymore.  They had to move her when they put in I-65, and now she’s on some farm, just sittin’.  Leans a bit, you can see it in the next shot––yeah, that one.  But she’s hangin’ in there.  Built in 1880, and still goin’ strong.”

Lanie handed the pictures back.  “It’s very beautiful.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a thing for bridges.  Covered bridges and seventies cars.  Don’t ask me why.”

“You call them ‘she.’  As if they’re women.”

Buddy laughed, although it came out as more of a giggle.  “No woman at home, so it must just be how I say things.”

Forty-five minutes later, they agreed they were once again home, in Lanie’s garage.  She got out first, as if he were dropping her off after a date.  “Thank you,” she said.  “I had a lovely time.”

He made a gallant, aw-shucks gesture.   “Not a problem.  How about same time, next week?  Or if we leave real early, we could drive down to Brown County.  This time of year, it’s great down there.”

She agreed with a smile that her sunglasses did nothing whatsoever to hide.   “Nine o’clock.  I’ll pack a picnic basket.”

By the time the drive to Brown County ended, it seemed perfectly natural to be holding hands across the white vinyl seat.  Did that imply they were dating, whatever that might mean?  Neither knew, and neither cared, although Buddy, in trying to imagine what he would say to his cronies at the Crow’s Nest Bar, knew that he lacked both the vocabulary and the experience to explain what he was up to.  He thought perhaps that he could tell anyone who noticed his pleased, slightly flushed expression, that he’d “met a real special lady,” but that seemed too stiff, too formal, and so entirely inadequate for the woman he’d come to know––the woman who could, in spurts, be witty and clever or withdrawn and mysterious––it wasn’t worth the trouble trying to figure it out.  One thing for sure, she knew her way around a picnic.  Deviled eggs, ham and cheese on sesame rolls, sliced Anjou pears, and sourdough pretzels.  Thoughtfully, she’d brought root beer just for him, preferring Perrier for herself.  They’d eaten it in the back seat, as a reasonable way of maintaining their illusions while still offering a change of scenery.

The next week, via brochures, they drove to the Eiteljorg Museum.  Both of them liked the Acoma pots and the Remington sculptures, but they found themselves left mutually cold by nearly everything produced after World War II. 

“I guess I’m just old-fashioned,” said Buddy, cheerfully unruffled. 

“Me, too,” said Lanie.

On the drive home, again holding hands, Buddy apologized for the roughness of his skin.  “Goes with the territory.  I got the hands of a guy who works for a living.”

Feeling shamed, Lanie blushed behind her sunglasses and bowed to a decidedly uncharacteristic need to explain.  “I don’t work at all,” she said, hardly louder than the tremble and purr of the Impala’s engine.  “My father was an executive with an airline, and he…well, he left me very well taken care of, and he knew I’d have trouble, given my condition––my conditions, really––what I mean is, he put money aside.  I don’t need much, so I live off the interest.”

Buddy nodded soberly.  “Kinda like one of them college chairs.  Endowed, or whatever that word is.”

“If you’re jealous or envious or whatever, I understand.”

But Buddy merely cocked his head and flicked the Impala’s indicator to signal a left turn.  “Some folks,” he said, “have it easy.  Some have it hard.  Some got both.  That’s kind of the way things are, and I’m not about to spend my days all agonized about it, y’know?  And it’s not like you’re rubbing it in anyone’s face.  So don’t feel like you got to explain yourself to me, or, you know, justify.  That’s not how I want us to be.”

They were almost home, Lanie could sense it.  She said, “Buddy, I want to explain myself to you––but wait, watch out for those bicyclists.”

“I see ‘em.”

Once safely past the cyclists, an invisible family of five, or possibly four, Buddy signaled again, turned right, and drove slowly––he was always a safe driver, a characteristic she adored––back to the house.  Almost home.  Or perhaps they were already home?  It was, she had to admit, difficult to tell.

“I used to go to therapy,” she began, but Buddy immediately interrupted.

“Lanie, you don’t have to say a word.”

Lanie’s voice rose only slightly, from insistence.  “This is my choice,” she said.  “My choice.”

“All right.”  Buddy repositioned himself, got comfortable.  “Fire away.”

“Therapy was a big part of my life.  I went for years, both before my parents died, and then for a while after.  Until just a few years ago, actually.  But with that kind of talk, therapy talking, I was supposed to work toward a cure––or if not a cure, toward blending.  ‘A more fulfilling form of integration,’ I remember that phrase like it was yesterday.  But I don’t want to integrate and blend.  I’d rather hide.”

With a non-committal grunt, Buddy withdrew his hand from Lanie’s in order to put the Impala in park and shut down the engine.  Home, then; back in the garage.  She wished the drive had taken longer, that they were still riding the byways, her hair being teased out of her scarf by whatever winds spilled through the half-open window, and the Impala’s heavy tires rolling over the tarmac.  Things seemed easy, out on the road, an idea that was so foreign and contradictory, it made Lanie sit straighter in her seat, as if it would coddle her, sing a lullaby, rock her to sleep.

Lolling sideways against the door, Buddy gazed at Lanie sidelong and tapped the nail of his index finger against his teeth.  It made a soft clicking sound, wooden.

“What?” she asked, a smile lifting the corners of her mouth.

“Third date,” he said, his eyes suddenly merry.  “Seems like if we were somebody else, or two somebody elses, we’d maybe kiss, but I can’t decide if that’s what this is.”

Lanie took a quick, pursed-lip breath, and reached, with two hands, for her sunglasses.  Very slowly, she removed them.  “Just so we’re clear,” she said, “I am a shut-in, yes, but I am  not––I am not a virgin, and I’m not afraid of…you know.  That.”

Buddy blinked at her, tried to stop himself from guffawing, and failed.  Luckily for them both, Lanie laughed too.  The hilarity of their courtship, inescapable at last, sent tears streaming down their faces.  When at last they settled––their jaws ached, they’d laughed so hard––he got out of the car, and went around to her side and let her out, going to so far as to offer his hand to help her rise.  Once he’d closed her door (as gently as he could, as he thought a chauffer might do), he hitched up his slacks and patted each pocket, three times (three times), then made very sure the car was locked and that he had the keys, and then he patted his pockets again.  By the time he was done, he looked so sheepish that it was all Lanie could do not to burst out laughing all over again.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I do kinda slow things down.”

“Oh, I don’t mind slow.”

At the kitchen door, Buddy removed his boots.  He took off his other clothes under Lanie’s direction, in the bedroom, and draped them neatly over a Queen Anne chair.  Then he went into the bathroom, checked each of the taps including the shower, and flushed the toilet three times.

“All good?” said Lanie, waiting.

“If I were at home,” Buddy said, thinking it over, “I’d have to check the locks on the doors, too––and when it’s dark, I do the windows.  You know, make sure they’re latched.  But I guess I’m not at home.”

“You can check them if you want.”

Buddy’s smile turned foolish as he battled with himself (the doors and windows really did need checking), but finally, he pushed the thought away.  “Maybe next time.”

From the bed, Lanie patted the mattress.  “Yes.  Let’s save lock-checking for date number four.  Assuming you would like there to be a date number four…?”

*

Saturdays remained their driving days, with overnights that spilled into Sunday brunch and whatever weather noontime brought.  Then they’d part, wistful and pleased, for six days of expectant separation.

Months passed: the gardening end of spring gave way to the sweat-sticky heat of summer, and then to the sudden relief of fall.  Lanie stayed indoors, and when she dressed, she dressed as always for the departed (but necessary) glamor of 1960.  Buddy checked his pockets and all manner of locks.  He always flossed and brushed three times each.

Once, Lanie grew angry when Buddy came late to the table because he was busy first with his pockets and then with the taps.  The eggs and sausage she’d cooked grew cold as he puttered and she fumed.  She stormed briefly to the bathroom, put on her head scarf and sunglasses, and examined herself in the mirror.  There stood Marilyn, and Marilyn said (in that trademark whisper, breathy wisps of vocal confection), “Take a deep breath, that’s a girl.  We all have our bad days.”  After that, buoyed by her own good advice and the sustaining support of her best friend, she went back to the kitchen, reheated the sausages, and made a fresh batch of eggs.  When he finally reached the table, Buddy, looking glum, said he was sorry.  Lanie waved his apology away.  “Please,” she said.  “Let’s be realistic.”

Early one December Saturday, winter arrived in a sudden huff, bringing four inches of blowing snow.  Buddy arrived a few minutes late, but was otherwise unhindered.  “Some drivers,” he groused, “shouldn’t be allowed out of their houses when it’s snowin’.”

Concerned, Lanie said, “Maybe today we shouldn’t go out?”

“Nah, it’ll be fine.  But,” he said, speaking as the idea came to him, “we should keep the door down.”

“The garage door?”

“Sure, yeah.  We’ll just keep the engine off.”

Of all the leaps they’d made in the course of their imaginary drives, including a miraculously long trip to visit the Cumberland Gap, a journey that somehow lasted only four hours total, this proved to be the most disconcerting, and not only for Lanie.  Even Buddy found himself pulling back from his brainchild, as hesitant as a fawn in a clearing.  Could their charade possibly hold up for even ten minutes if they didn’t bother to actually run the Impala?

“Well,” said Lanie, “if we do that, then I’d better dig out the space heater.”

Buddy blinked.  “Say what now?”

“It’s cold in the garage, and the car won’t be giving any heat, so…”

They drove that afternoon to another of Buddy’s favorite covered bridges, the Dunbar Bridge, one he’d never seen snow-covered.  It was very beautiful (they both agreed on this) despite the fact that in the brochures they brought along, together with a thermos of hot cocoa, the bridge appeared only in shady summer sunlight, draped from above by verdant, leafy trees.

 “Never mind,” said Lanie, and she touched her forehead lightly with her finger.  “I can see it all right here.  The mind’s eye.”

 New Year’s came and went.  January clouded into February and blew angrily into March, but spring, once it arrived, put on an exceptional show.  Once the weather was warmer, Buddy began to seriously consider kidnapping Lanie––not from her life in general, but in the Impala.  It would be the work of only a moment to simply back out of the garage and roll down the driveway.  In his head if not his heart, he fantasized about how this would cure her, how the shock of being immersed beneath a clear blue sky would demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world at large could still be her oyster.  But then he’d hare off to triple-check a set of locks, or reorganize his tools according to size, or weight, or manufacturer, and he’d shake his head in dismay, laughing at his own foolishness.  Lanie’s thirty-fifth birthday was only weeks away, and his forty-second was one just one month past that.  “Curing” Lanie was not only beside the point, it would likely kill her––or at least kill off their relationship.  Fantasies be damned, he would not risk what he had for the world.

For her part, Lanie had guessed with perfect accuracy what Buddy was thinking, but she kept her head.  She knew she’d have warning, in any event, since in order to conserve fuel, Buddy no longer turned the key in the ignition to start their drives.  Had he done so, she figured she could leap out of the car before it really got going; likely she’d land in a heap in the garage and muss her clothes, but it would be worth it, if push came to shove.

It never did.

“We should start a club,” said Buddy, one night over dinner as he sawed away at a juicy rump steak.  “No, seriously.  A tolerance club.”

“That sounds very…I don’t know, what are you talking about?”

“Well, you know.  You put up with me, and I put up with you––no, come on, I don’t mean it like that.  You know what I’m talking about.  And it’s not like there aren’t a million things I don’t like, but hell––heck, sorry––if you and me can learn to live with each other, well, then the sky’s the limit, right?”

Lanie giggled.  “Buddy.  Please pass the salt.”

Outside in the garage, the Impala dreamed fitful dreams of its own, remembering as best it could the feeling of highway wind fluting through its grillwork and shearing over its flanks.  Once, it was certain––there was simply no possibility it could be making this up––it had been a real car, a driving car, a driven car.  A car of the road.  It had been manufactured, assembled, born…and then it had been broken, horse-like, and made to obey its driver.  There had been great wide vistas, and speed, and magnificent forward progress.

Long ago, four men had taken it into Arkansas.  Surely that was true?  Two of the men were from another country; they spoke with funny accents, and talked a lot about music, the blues.  They wanted to see “the real America.”  The Impala had chuckled at that.  “The real America.”  Well, they’d found it, all right.  Pulled over by local cops in Fordyce, Arkansas, the men had been herded away––arrested, was that the word?––and the Impala had been impounded.  Which meant sitting.  Waiting.  Prevented from driving on its way.

There was very little driving after that.  The Impala was bought and sold several times, and kept under wraps between whiles.  “This car,” said the various owners, addressing anyone they wished to impress, “was driven by Keith Richards.  The Rolling Stones, right?  This was the car that almost brought him down.”

So what if it had new owners now, very different, and not at all demanding.  A driver who never drove.  A passenger who never expressed a desire to go anywhere at all.  The Impala could not figure this out, but now that spring had arrived, it no longer cared.  There was a trip to a new covered bridge in the offing, and perhaps a state park the week after that. 

The possibilities, such as they were, seemed endless.