BEANSTALK and other shorts

Abandoned

The car smelt like mold. It was out by the riverbank in the back pastures. Cassie went there when she wanted to think. Once, that jalopy had been a creature of time and motion. You entered it to move from one part of your life to another that you thought would be better. You entered it to transit. Now it sat empty at the center of nothing, and it gave her a ringside seat on her personal journey. When she sat down in the cobwebby old cab and rustled a place for herself among the dried leaves on the bulging vinyl, she was stopping at a point that was neither A nor B. Life was in motion around her, and only she was still, watching the eddies of her own experience hit dry land and leave mute patterns on the shifting pebbles of beaches she hadn’t reached yet.

An abandoned car is a place where somebody quit. They could have bought parts, done a diagnostic, pulled it into the shop for repairs; started back on the long road to rehabilitation. Or they could have sold the old model, turned it in for scrap, traded it for parts, towed it off and got something new. Those are the choices, aren’t they? Go forward or go back. That’s what they told you. But whoever left the car had not done either: they had just stopped, just driven it into the field and left it there, proof that there is a third option no one talks about. The option to quit: walk away, let time and weather and circumstantial factors finish the story, finish the car. It had never been registered to a new owner, but now it belonged to nobody. And in that way, it belonged to everybody.

So the car was sitting there quietly doing nothing, and sometimes Cassie joined it. She thought about the third option. They said she had to work things out with Earl, make her family survive. They said she had responsibilities. They said, you’re a mother, there’s no backing out of that. Life goes on, they said. If you divorce him, you’ll just have to make a life for yourself and a disabled child; get a job and a babysitter and some new place to live. It’ll be hard. Why not just put up with a little rough-housing on the odd Saturday night, a few bruises now and then, and just stop grumbling? Everybody knows what Earl’s like. It’s not like they blame you. And how could you date and find somebody new with that sick boy wagging at your heels all the time? You can’t have your youth back. You can’t unmake your choices.

But Cassie looked at the car and thought of leaving her family behind like that. Don’t fix it; don’t replace it; don’t provide for it – just walk off and leave it in a field somewhere. Let their memories of her grow sunburned and moldy and collect dried leaves. Let the glove compartment hang open with its cheap trash collapsing outward. People would talk about her. But they did anyway. She’d go to Topeka, be a single woman again, not young but youngish. A woman with no past, no ties. The child would still be registered to her, but she’d leave it in the fields to the kindness of nature; and in the end, it would belong to everybody.