just carried on. This thing with the car was no different. If there was some way to
fight it, if there was some door to pound in response, my dad wouldn’t have
done it anyway.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, before unlocking the car.
We rode back to the city that night without much discussion about what
had happened. It was too exhausting, maybe, to parse. In any event, we were
done with the suburbs. My father must have had to drive the car to work the
next day looking the way it did, and I’m sure that didn’t sit well with him. But
the gash in his chrome didn’t stay for long. As soon as there was time, he took
the car over to the body shop at Sears and had it erased.