My Father's House After He No Longer Needed It

We'd been clearing out my father's house at Sorro Hill Farm, and had just finished dropping off some of his furniture at my friend Noah's consignment store in 'Neath Lake.

It was raining.

Roxanne, probably sensing the absurd curvature of my heart, chose to give me a break and drive Sam Oht's truck back to the Bingo Diner while I rode in the passenger seat. She was not used to the truck though and drove through the parking lot, which was a washboard of fallen limbs, a little too quickly and onto the twisting two-lane road, faster than she should have.

She had been my friend since high-school. She loved me once but I couldn't manage it and it still tore through me like shrapnel.

I enjoyed, perhaps because she's so capable of improvising solutions in tough situations, watching her have to concentrate on something that was essentially so easy, the driving that was, and at the same time so perilous. She was wearing her glasses and they made her already attractive features, to my mind, even more striking. It was as if the glasses improved both her vision and my potential for observation.

I thought I had something to say, but my aim crumpled to the floor with a couple of empty diet coke bottles.

After driving a short way, she said to me, "The steering on this truck has become a little, uh, tangential to the direction that we really want to be heading."

Her cut-off blue jeans were wet and seemed to be unwinding as she tried to bronco-ride the truck into the right lane.

A flock of birds, common grackles, stretched like a banner across the grey sky.

She glanced at me.

"Does this worry you, or do you just figure that someday you'll roll this truck over and have to be extricated in pieces?"

"I suppose that's the way it will happen," I said. "I should probably make sure there's enough life insurance to have O'Clarity's Funeral Home stitch me back together before my being viewed at my wake."

Coming the other way on Maindaring Road was a riot of Winnebagos. Some kind of clanking nonsense erupted from the bed of the truck.

"Why don't you bring the truck to O'Clarity's Garage first and have them look at the steering? Do you even have life insurance?"

Why is it that lies taste like chocolate and truth tastes like grout?

"No life insurance," I said, "but getting it has been on my to-do list."

"The list you never write?"

"The first thing on the list is, 'find paper and pen' and anyway I'm reluctant to start a to-do list. I'm afraid that there will be so few things on it that I will complete the tasks very quickly and then the Great Eternal Being will notice that I have completed the list and decide that it's time to have me roll the truck over."

"Do you really think that's the way it works?" she asked.

She purposely slid the truck close to the shoulder of the road but because the accuracy of any move of the steering wheel was more fuzzy than she thought, a few sprigs of forsythia snapped against the side mirror and windshield. She started humming in order to provide some contradictory evidence that she wasn't afraid.

She slowed down and a few minutes later, like a half-past romeo and an accidental juliet, we arrived at the Bingo Diner.