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The argument began on a Tuesday morning at the Grounds for Divorce, which was when most arguments began there, Tuesday being far enough removed from Sunday for Christian restraint to have worn off and still too early in the week for anyone to have accomplished enough to feel charitable. Lucinda was behind the counter with the Bunn-O-Matic, Delgado was in the kitchen conducting a private disagreement with a sheet pan, and the regular table had filled in the usual order: Angus Hopper beneath his brown hat, Rex Hall in the white pharmacist coat he wore everywhere except bed and possibly there, Chad with a Piggly Wiggly name badge that said ACTING MANAGER as though the board might convene at any moment, Rusty Hammer with sawdust still caught in his red beard, Pastor Peterson looking rested in the particular way of a man whose busiest day was already behind him, and New Guy, who had been coming for nearly four years and was now less a newcomer than a permanent example of how slowly Fort Stockton accepted paperwork.

Trixie sat at the end of the table with her purse in the empty chair beside her, thereby preserving both her personal space and her constitutional right to decide who deserved it. The Captain occupied the next table with a yellow legal pad, a coffee cup and his khaki CMC baseball cap turned backward. He was writing, or pretending to write, which at the Grounds for Divorce were considered separate professions but produced roughly the same amount of taxable income.

Outside the front window, angled toward the curb, sat his white-over-blue 1960 Ford Fairlane 500 four-door sedan. It was clean without being precious, handsome without asking anyone to notice, and large enough to carry six adults, more if they were either friendly or Methodist. The morning sun caught the chrome along the top of the horizontal fins and the huge curved back window above the broad blue package shelf. Nobody had been discussing the Fairlane until New Guy looked through the glass and said he had always liked the lines but would have held out for a two-door.

There are remarks that enter a room quietly and remarks that arrive carrying their own folding chair. This one settled itself at the table.

“Of course you would,” Trixie said.

New Guy looked at her. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’ve been here almost four years and still think your opinion is a contribution.”

“I was only giving my two cents.”

Trixie took a deliberate drink of coffee. “Your two cents are the reason they got rid of pennies.”

Rex laughed hard enough to fog the lower half of his glasses. Chad, who had spent the preceding minute studying something on his telephone, looked up and said, “Speaking of things nobody wanted to know, I just found out Grandpa is addicted to Viagra. Nobody is taking it harder than Grandma.”

Pastor Peterson closed his eyes. He did not pray, exactly, but appeared willing to let the Lord know where he could be found if intervention became necessary.

“What does that have to do with cars?” Rex asked.

“Nothing,” Chad said. “But it seemed like we were broadening the discussion.”

Lucinda arrived with the coffee pot and topped off every cup except Chad’s. “You’ve had enough stimulation.”

The Captain continued writing. He knew better than to defend the Fairlane before being asked. At the Grounds for Divorce, volunteering an opinion was like feeding a stray cat beneath the porch: by sundown it had brought relatives and somebody expected you to pay for surgery.

Angus leaned sideways to look at the car. “Four doors aren’t bad. They just aren’t collectible.”

That made the Captain stop writing.

Rusty noticed. “I believe we have located the nerve.”

“I didn’t say they were bad cars,” Angus continued. “They were family cars. Salesmen drove them. School principals. People with children who got carsick. But when somebody says collector car, nobody pictures a four-door sedan.”

“I do,” the Captain said.

The table turned toward him with the pleased attention of townspeople who had just heard breaking glass outside a business they did not own.

“Naturally,” Rex said. “You bought one.”

“That does not make me wrong.”

“No,” Trixie said. “It only gives you motive.”

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The Captain laid down his pen. He did not rise, because the Grounds for Divorce was not Congress and because no worthwhile speech had ever been improved by making the audience look at a man’s belt buckle. “The four-door sedan is the most honest old car a person can own. It does not pretend everybody who rode in 1960 was twenty-three, unmarried and driving to California with the top down. Most people were taking children to school, groceries home from Piggly Wiggly and Aunt Mildred to the doctor. They bought four doors because four doors worked.”

“A refrigerator works,” Angus said. “Nobody takes one to a car show.”

“Give Mayor Goodman time,” Lucinda said.

The Captain pointed through the window. “Suppose four of us want to go somewhere in that Fairlane. The people in back open their own doors and get in. Nobody folds a front seat, climbs sideways, apologizes for a knee in somebody’s kidney or discovers halfway down Highway 18 that he no longer possesses the flexibility required to get out.”

Pastor Peterson nodded. “My knees support the motion.”

“And the back seat was designed for adults,” the Captain said. “Real legroom. Real headroom. You can put grandchildren back there without lowering them through an opening like mail into a rural box. Try installing a child safety seat in the back of a two-door coupe. First you kneel on the rocker panel, then you crawl halfway inside, then the buckle disappears beneath the seat, and by the time you find it the child has graduated from college.”

Rusty said he had once installed two car seats in the rear of a Mustang and had not stood fully upright for three days.

“That’s because you did it wrong,” New Guy said.

“It is a known fact,” Rusty replied, “that more factual information is gained by one dog sniffing another dog’s ass than a human being gets from watching Fox News, and either one would still leave you better informed than you are right now.”

Brother Bob had just entered and caught only the last nine words. “Amen,” he said, then asked Lucinda what they were talking about.

“Doors.”

Brother Bob considered that. “I’m generally for them.”

The Captain continued. A sedan usually had a useful trunk, he said, the sort built before automobile designers began sacrificing cubic feet to make the rear of every car look as if it were fleeing downhill. The Fairlane could take suitcases, folding chairs, groceries, a stroller and the accumulated roadside purchases of a wife who had been assured there was no more room. A four-door wagon was better still. Two-door wagons were handsome, certainly, but requiring rear passengers to enter through the front doors was an architectural decision best explained by a man who had never traveled with children.

“And those late-fifties four-door hardtop wagons,” he said, “were some of the best-looking automobiles ever made.”

Angus stared at him. “You expect us to believe a station wagon can be beautiful?”

“You own a fifty-seven Porsche because you became tired of getting into a pickup without falling.”

“That is unrelated.”

“It is related by doors, age and denial.”

Lucinda returned from the pie case carrying a slice of chocolate cream for herself and a small salad for nobody in particular. “Right now chocolate is good for you and lettuce can kill you,” she said. “I’ve been training my whole life for this.” She sat the salad in front of Chad and ate the first bite of pie standing up.

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The Captain said a four-door sedan had nearly always cost less to buy, and in many cases less to insure, because insurance companies regarded a coupe as sporty even when its acceleration could be timed with a wall calendar. When the cars were new, the sedan’s production volume and practical nature often made it the sensible value. Now the collector market had reversed the logic without changing the hardware. A two-door Chevrolet, Ford or Mopar might cost twice what a comparable four-door brought, sometimes more, merely because two of its doors had been removed at the factory.

“They didn’t remove them,” Rex said. “They built it that way.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I am a pharmacist. Precision is the thin white line between medicine and manslaughter.”

“You sell decorative soaps.”

“At a thirty-eight-percent margin.”

The Captain began naming examples. A Tri-Five Chevrolet Bel Air with two doors was treated like a family heirloom even if the family had only owned it since Thursday, while the four-door version might still be bought by someone with an ordinary checking account. The same market distinction followed the Chevrolet Impala, the Ford Galaxie, the Dodge Coronet and Plymouth Satellite, the early-seventies GM A-bodies and even the Hudson Hornet. Two doors brought glamour, hot-rodding potential and auction excitement. Four doors brought the same dashboard, much of the same chassis, often the same engine, and enough money left over to repair what the previous owner had described as “mostly sorted.”

Rusty nodded at this. In the restoration trade, “mostly sorted” meant all the loose bolts had been collected in one coffee can.

“But the restoration costs the same,” Rex said. “Paint does not get cheaper because you have more door jambs.”

“Exactly,” the Captain said. “Which is why buying the car for half as much matters. If I begin with a twenty-thousand-dollar coupe and you begin with a ten-thousand-dollar sedan, you have ten thousand dollars to spend before we are equally foolish.”

“That may be the strongest argument so far,” Trixie said.

The room had shifted slightly. Nobody had surrendered, but several men had moved from contempt to arithmetic, which is how most deeply held American principles eventually meet their end.

The Captain picked up his legal pad and wrote six names and twelve figures from memory. He explained that in 1960 Ford sold nearly 144,000 four-door Galaxie models against roughly 96,000 two-doors. The Impala leaned even more heavily toward four doors, as did the Bonneville and the Cadillac DeVille. The Plymouth Fury came closer to an even split, but its four-door models still finished ahead. The Chrysler Newport was not close at all: buyers chose more than 45,000 four-doors and fewer than 10,000 two-door hardtops.

“So?” Angus said. “People also bought black-and-white televisions.”

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“So the old-car hobby has edited the past,” the Captain replied. “Go watch a movie actually filmed in 1960. Look at the curb, the traffic, the cars behind the actors. Four-door sedans are everywhere because four-door sedans were everywhere. Then watch a modern movie set in 1960. Suddenly America is populated entirely by coupes, convertibles and one station wagon carrying a family we are supposed to worry about. Production companies use what collectors preserved, and collectors preserved the glamorous cars. We have mistaken what survived for what existed.”

For a moment nobody answered. Through the window, the Fairlane sat in the sun with all four door handles plainly visible, as ordinary and historically accurate as a grocery receipt.

Pastor Peterson broke the silence. “In my day, if you said, ‘That’s not fair,’ your parents said, ‘Life’s not fair.’ And that was the end of your TED Talk.”

Nobody knew precisely how this applied, including Pastor Peterson, but the sentence possessed the firm moral shape of something that ought to, and several people nodded.

The Captain said the finest proof was the 1961 Lincoln Continental. Ford introduced it against a Cadillac range that seemed to offer a separate model for every dentist in North America and an Imperial line broad enough to require a directory. Lincoln offered two choices: a four-door sedan and a four-door convertible. That was all. The sedan’s proportions were so disciplined, its center-opening doors so distinctive and its shape so clean that nobody looked at it and wondered when the coupe was coming. A coupe did not arrive until 1966. The convertible disappeared after 1967. The sedan remained because the sedan was the automobile Lincoln had designed the whole idea around.

“Suicide doors,” Chad said.

“Center-opening doors,” Rex corrected.

“That sounds like something a funeral home calls them.”

“Either way,” the Captain said, “it was a four-door car that became an American design landmark. Four doors did not make it less beautiful. They were part of why it was beautiful.”

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Trixie turned toward the window. “Your Ford is no Lincoln Continental.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Just establishing the limits of the defense.”

Angus admitted he would not mind a four-door hardtop if it had no center pillar. Rex said removing the pillar did not remove two doors. Angus said it removed the sedan look. Rex said that was styling, not mathematics. Chad proposed that the number of doors should be determined by whether the trunk counted, which caused Pastor Peterson to say that Revelation had warned about men like Chad, although not by name.

New Guy suggested a four-door could be made more collectible by welding the rear doors shut. Trixie stared at him until he lowered his coffee cup and found something urgent to inspect in the bottom.

By ten o’clock the argument had widened to include wagons, hardtops, fastbacks, club sedans, business coupes, pickup cabs, the increasing disappearance of sedans beneath a national flood of trucks, crossovers and sport-utility vehicles, and whether a vehicle could properly be called a coupe if it had four doors but a sufficiently low roof. Nobody changed sides completely. Angus conceded that a four-door Galaxie might be worth owning but insisted it would look better with two doors. Rex conceded the economics while observing that an inexpensive purchase could still finance an expensive catastrophe. Rusty liked anything old enough to be repaired with tools he already owned. Trixie said she preferred a car with enough doors to leave through whichever one was farthest from the person irritating her.

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The four-door hardtop sedan may have been the cleverest compromise Detroit ever produced. With the center pillar removed and all four windows lowered, it possessed the same long, uninterrupted sweep of glass that made the two-door hardtop so desirable. From across a parking lot it carried much of the coupe’s elegance: a low roofline, thin pillars and an open-air appearance that made an ordinary family automobile look as though it had somewhere better to be. It borrowed the coupe’s best visual trick without requiring anyone in the back seat to enter the car through an opening intended for the front.

Yet it remained a genuine four-door automobile. Rear passengers had their own doors, their own full-size seating area and the ability to get out without folding a seat, twisting sideways or placing a hand on somebody else’s shoulder for leverage. Children, grandparents, groceries and car seats could all be loaded with considerably less negotiation. The four-door hardtop managed to be graceful without becoming inconvenient and practical without looking apologetic—proof that, for one brief period, Detroit understood that beauty and usefulness did not have to ride in separate cars.

Lucinda collected the cups one by one. “What have we decided?”

“Four-door sedans are undervalued,” the Captain said.

“Four-door sedans are correctly valued,” Angus said at the same time.

“A door is not a door if it opens into a cargo area,” Chad said.

“Nobody asked that,” Rex told him.

“The Lincoln was pretty,” Trixie said.

Pastor Peterson looked toward the ceiling. “And life is not fair.”

Lucinda considered the accumulated wisdom, then wiped the table clean with one long pass of her towel. Outside, a late-model crossover pulled in beside the Fairlane. It was silver, efficient, anonymous and shaped like every other vehicle designed after manufacturers discovered that Americans wanted the seating position of a pickup, the manners of a sedan and the silhouette of a household appliance. A woman got out, opened the rear door, lifted a toddler from a safety seat and came inside without having to fold anything, crawl over anything or ask forgiveness of her lower spine.

The Captain watched her, but wisely did not point.

Nothing had been settled regarding the four-door sedan. Nothing ever was at the Grounds for Divorce. The place depended upon coffee, pie and the renewable energy produced when six people left an argument more certain than when they entered it. If a question were ever finally answered, Lucinda would have to remove a chair, and enough answered questions would eventually put her out of business.

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The regulars drifted away toward the rest of Tuesday. Rex returned to the drugstore, Chad to the Piggly Wiggly, Rusty back to his cabin beside the lake and Angus to whichever ranch chore could be postponed until after he had checked whether anyone else was working. The Captain stayed behind long enough to finish his coffee. Then he went outside, opened the Fairlane’s front door, placed his legal pad on the passenger seat and stood for a moment beside the long white-over-blue sedan.

It remained what it had been before the argument: less valuable than the coupe, more useful than the coupe, more representative of its time than the coupe and of no particular concern to anyone except the man who owned it.

He got in and drove away through Fort Stockton with two empty seats beside him, three empty seats behind him and a separate door available for every one of them.

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