The Cars We Drove

My father's car was a 1987 something— I forget the model but remember the sound: a cough that meant winter, a rattle that meant Tuesday, a silence that meant pull over. He loved that car the way men of his generation loved things that needed them— broken enough to require attention, functional enough to justify it. I learned to drive in a parking lot at sixteen, jerking forward like a horse that didn't trust its rider. The clutch was a conversation I kept losing. My first car: $800, no AC, radio stuck on one station that played only songs I didn't choose. I have never been so free. Somewhere between that first car and this one— quiet, reliable, paying it off in installments that feel like growing up— I lost the belief that a car could take me anywhere. Now it takes me to work. To the store. To school pickup. The odometer counts not miles but obligations. But sometimes, on a highway late at night, no one behind me, no one ahead, I press the gas a little harder than I need to and something old wakes up— the boy in the parking lot, the cough, the rattle, the magnificent unreliability of being young and pointed somewhere.