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You know it’s a slow day at the Grounds for Divorce when it’s just Hairless and me holding down the fort, rattling around in that big room like two loose nickels in a Folgers can. Lucinda’s got nothing else to do but keep our cups topped off and pretend she isn’t listening, which is her particular art form. Delgado’s in the back, quiet as a church mouse with a knife, and the Bunn-O-Matic sounds louder than it ought to. The whole place feels… off. Not bad, exactly. Just misaligned, like the earth itself slipped a half inch sometime overnight and nobody filled out the paperwork.

Fort Stockton has always had a pace, but that morning it was like the pace had misplaced its shoes. Traffic out on Dickinson was thin even by our standards. The square looked like a movie set between takes. Ever since Mayor Goodman got elected, and then re-elected just to spite decency and common sense, there’s been a low-grade hum of things not sitting quite right. But this was different. This was quieter than politics. This was cosmological.

We’re sitting there in our corner booth, the one with the vinyl that sighs when you slide across it, and Hairless drops this grenade into the coffee.

“I drove a white Peugeot sedan all through the nineties,” he says, casual as ordering toast.

I don’t say anything at first. I’m staring out the window past my Fairlane 500, parked crooked like it always is, and into the great empty ledger of time. Hairless has a way of doing that. Just when you think you’ve got the man cataloged, indexed, cross-referenced, he flips over a card you didn’t know existed.  I swear the man would be a billionaire if he ever joined the Texas Hold’Em Tour.

“You what,” I finally say.

“A Peugeot,” he repeats. “I drove a white, stick shift Peugeot 405 all over West Texas with a feeling of near-absolute impunity from the depredations of the Edwards Plateau thievery class….”

Could’ve knocked me over with a feather duster from Rex Hall’s drugstore. I’ve known this man for years. We’ve talked engines, suspensions, transmissions, rear ends, front ends, and a few moral gray areas in between. And never once had he mentioned owning anything French that wasn’t a cigarette lighter or something to do with a (reasonably) fine wine.

Lucinda pauses mid-pour. Delgado pokes his head out like there’s about to be violence or CPR, maybe both.

“Sorry,” I tell Hairless. “I just hadn’t thought about Peugeot in… ever. Much less you driving one for a decade.”

Fort Stockton is Ford and Chevy country. Always has been. Sure, there were Oldsmobiles back when Oldsmobile meant something, and Mercuries when Mercury wasn’t a punchline. You’ll see a Dodge RAM now and then, usually wearing the dust of an oilfield or the look of a man who hasn’t slept indoors in a week. But we are not a cosmopolitan people. Despite the magazines Trixie keeps laying out at the Klip-N-Dye, none of us are secretly Parisian.

If you wanted something French growing up here, you went to the Dairy Twin and ordered fries. The thought of actually driving something Napoleonic never crossed anyone’s mind.

Which is how my brain ended up drifting backward, stirred awake by Hairless’s confession, back to the only other Peugeot I ever knew in the wild. The first one. The one that mattered.

I was seventeen. Senior at Jim Bowie High School, “Home of the Fightin’ Knives”. Back when graduating classes felt enormous because you’d never seen the world yet and four hundred people seemed like a small city. I worked part-time at Paisano Pete’e Pizza Parlor, just enough hours to keep gas in the Fairlane, money for dates, and cash for whatever Stevie Nicks had put out most recently on cassette.  My Clarion under-dash AM / FM cassette player demanded a steady diet of new Stevie Nicks, and I was not about to say no.

It wasn’t a bad job once you learned to let someone else chop jalapeños if you had even a paper cut. A guy I worked with, older and married, ignored that rule and paid for it later at home. His wife got quite a surprise.  Wisdom, like interest, compounds with time.

Anyway.

One Friday before the dinner rush, Spicy Fingers, who earned his nickname the hard way, leaned over and said, “They hired a new waitress. You might know her. I think she goes to Jim Bowie.”

That narrowed it down to about half the county.

I didn’t think much of it until she walked in through the side door wearing that navy-blue polyester uniform. Paisano Pete’e Pizza Parlor stitched across the chest, all the P’s shaped like pepperoni sausages. The Road Runner mascot tossing pizza dough in the air like he was born in Naples. It was both cheerful and unsettling, like a sausage party designed by a focus group.

We just stood there looking at each other. That look where you’re sure you’ve seen someone a hundred times but never in this lighting, this context. Introducing yourself would have been ridiculous. Hugging would’ve gotten someone fired. It lasted maybe seven seconds but felt like a hostage situation.

“Hey,” I finally said.

“Hey,” she said back.

She glanced at my name tag, hoping for clarity, and found none. In a fit of adolescent genius, I’d used the label maker to type out BUSTER HYMEN. I remained anonymous and declared my sense of humor in one move. It made me chuckle but offered her no help in putting a name to the face.

Her name was Jody Denton. I knew that later. At school she ran with a group I couldn’t define then and still can’t now. Maybe popular. Maybe just self-contained. I’d blown out a knee sophomore year and drifted away from football. I wasn’t musical. I floated between cliques like a neutral country.

At work, though, we figured out a rhythm. I watched her orders. Made sure they were hot, heavy on toppings. She called me Buster. Smiled sometimes. At school we didn’t speak. We nodded, grinned, exchanged silent acknowledgments like spies passing on a bridge.

What sealed it, though, was the car.

A few days into her employment, parked right next to my Fairlane behind Paisano Pete’e, was a white 1968 Peugeot 404 sedan. I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it. I might not have been aware the French built cars at all. Maybe vaguely amused by a Citroën once in a magazine. But this? This was different.

My Fairlane had fins that went straight out, low and wide like it was built to skim the earth. The Peugeot’s fins went straight up, tidy and vertical, like punctuation. Mine was bench seat democracy. Hers had buckets. Mine was long, hers compact. It was yin and yang, written in steel.

The 404 had been styled by Pininfarina, though I didn’t know that then. I just knew it looked serious. Honest. European in a way Fort Stockton wasn’t prepared for. Fifteen-inch steel wheels with full covers, Michelin tires that looked like they’d never been spun for show. Power front discs, rear drums. A sunroof that leaked when it rained hard, though rain itself was already a foreign concept here. Bright windshield trim missing. Weatherstripping tired. Paint cracked and chipped like it had stories but didn’t brag.

Inside, red vinyl everywhere. Reclining front seats. A proper rear bench. Jaeger gauges with a 100-mph speedometer that didn’t promise what it couldn’t deliver. A clock that kept French time. Three-point seatbelts up front, lap belts in the back, rust in the footwells, and a dashboard that had seen better decades.

Under the hood was a 1.6-liter inline four, fed by a single downdraft carburetor, hooked to a column-shifted four-speed manual that someone had swapped in. Ninety-three thousand miles showing, give or take a life.

Her father, I found out, taught at Pecos County Community College. The car had been his. Saved for her. Like the Fairlane was mine, it embarrassed her at first. Then it became part of her. She grew into it.

I teased her mercilessly. Spoke in a bad French accent whenever I mentioned it. Changed my name tag to PEPÉ LE PEW, which made her laugh and the manager make threats. She called my Fairlane the Nimitz, said it looked like an aircraft carrier. I told her size mattered. She said, “That’s why we didn’t talk at school.”

We took breaks in the parking lot, switching cars depending on mood. There may have been smoking involved. The details are fuzzy.

Hairless interrupted me back at the Grounds. “So. When’d y’all seal the deal? And in whose car?”

“Never,” I said. “Wasn’t even a consideration. And if it had been, bench seat wins.”

It wasn’t about that. It was about proximity. Circumstance. Two kids who never would’ve spoken, connected by pizza grease and oddball cars.

That summer after graduation I was supposed to go off to Central Texas Methodist University. Buttercup walked in one morning with friends, fresh out of summer school. We’d flirted in History class before. This time it stuck. I quit Paisano Pete’s for a better job. Didn’t go away to school. Buttercup and I married three years later.

I never saw Jody Denton again. Never saw that Peugeot. But I carried both with me. Quietly. Like good tools you don’t think about until you need them.

Hairless nodded, eyes distant now. Lucinda slid us fresh cups. Outside, traffic picked up just a hair. The earth felt like it settled back into place.

Funny thing about French cars. Or strange days. Or small towns. They don’t change you loud. They just widen you enough to notice when something’s off.

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