There were four styling chairs at the Klip-N-Dye, although Trixie had not needed all four at once since sometime during the first Reagan administration, when Fort Stockton women still regarded a weekly appointment at the beauty shop as one of the obligations of citizenship. The chairs were upholstered in red vinyl and mounted on chrome hydraulic pedestals that could elevate a five-foot-two woman to a height from which she could properly assess the shortcomings of a six-foot husband. Three hooded dryers occupied the back wall, two of which worked and one of which Trixie kept because it was good for parts, although nobody could remember which was which. The air carried the permanent aroma of shampoo, warm hair, nail polish remover and enough aerosol hairspray to make open flame inadvisable anywhere between the front door and the Pecos County line.
Trixie had been cutting hair there long enough to understand that hair was seldom the only reason a woman came through the door. The Klip-N-Dye was a repair facility for considerably more than follicles. Marriages were examined, children discussed, grandchildren compared, doctors evaluated and men who had foolishly believed something said in the privacy of their own homes occasionally discovered that the information had reached three other households before lunch. Trixie considered confidentiality an important professional obligation. She simply defined it as waiting until the customer had driven away before discussing her business with anyone else.
On a Tuesday morning in October, eighty-seven-year-old Evelyn Mercer occupied Chair Number Two beneath a pale blue cape while Trixie worked carefully around her left ear. Evelyn had reached the age when people began asking how she was feeling before asking anything else, which irritated her because she generally felt exactly eighty-seven and saw no reason to issue daily medical bulletins. She had buried a husband, both parents, a sister, several close friends and every dentist she had ever trusted. She still lived in her own house, still drove during daylight hours and still believed anyone who described eighty-seven as “young” should be slapped for insincerity. Every third Tuesday at ten-thirty she came to the Klip-N-Dye, and for thirty-two years she had begun each appointment with the same instruction.
“Don’t take too much off.”
“You always say that.”
“Because you always take too much off.”
“I have never cut your hair too short.”
“Christmas of 1998.”
Trixie’s scissors stopped.
“That was volume.”
“I looked like Mamie Eisenhower.”
“You asked for volume.”
“I got a weather system.”
Trixie smiled and resumed cutting.
Outside, Fort Stockton went about the complicated business of remaining Fort Stockton. A pickup passed carrying something under a blue tarp secured by three bungee cords and faith. Across the street a man stood beside a utility trailer staring at a flat tire with the expression of someone who had just discovered infidelity. Somewhere farther down the block a dog barked steadily at circumstances beyond its control. The October morning was warm enough that nobody had yet admitted summer was over.
Then Trixie heard an engine.
She did not immediately look up. Fort Stockton still contained enough elderly pickups, restored automobiles, unrestored automobiles and vehicles whose continued operation represented either mechanical genius or regulatory oversight that unusual noises seldom interrupted a haircut. But this one was different. Low and soft, eight cylinders working through an exhaust system that had no need to announce itself. Something about it made Trixie glance toward the plate-glass window just as a red convertible eased to the curb.
“Well, that’s pretty.”
Evelyn watched Trixie’s reflection in the mirror. “What is?”
“Old Ford convertible.”
“What year?”
Trixie squinted. “Old.”
“That narrows it down.”
“Early fifties, maybe.”
Evelyn’s eyes shifted toward the portion of the front window visible in the mirror. The automobile outside was red, a deep glossy red with small blemishes and bubbles beginning to show beneath the finish. Chrome ran generously across the grille, bumpers and body because the car had been built when Detroit still considered restraint something Europeans did because they lacked resources. The convertible top was folded behind the broad bench seat, and at the rear a spare tire stood upright in a Coronado-style continental kit that added another foot to a car already long enough to require advance notice when changing ZIP codes.
It was a 1953 Ford Crestline Sunliner.
Evelyn stopped breathing.
Her eyes moved across the Ford slowly: windshield, hood, chrome trim, dashboard and finally the steering wheel with its anniversary emblem in the center. The years did not disappear. Years never do. They folded, one upon another, until an eighty-seven-year-old woman could suddenly see through them.
“It was white.”
Trixie looked toward the street and back at Evelyn.
“That one’s red.”
“I know.”
There was enough in the way she said it that Trixie lowered the scissors.
Evelyn reached for the cape. “Take this off me.”
“I’ve only done one side.”
“Take it off.”
“You’ll look like you escaped during surgery.”
“Trixie.”
That was enough. Trixie unclipped the cape, and Evelyn walked to the window with the left side of her hair neatly trimmed and the right side still waiting for professional intervention. She stood with one hand against the glass.
The Ford remained at the curb.
Red now.
But it had been Sandstone White.
And in June of 1953, it had belonged to Tommy Carlisle.
Tommy was twenty-one when he bought the Sunliner, three years older than Evelyn and possessed of the sort of confidence available only to young men who have recently acquired either a convertible or a woman willing to ride in one. He arrived at her parents’ house shortly before seven on a Friday evening with the top down, forcing him to conduct the first important automobile presentation of his life from a defensive position near the front porch.
Tommy explained that it was Ford’s fiftieth anniversary. Beneath the long white hood was the familiar 239-cubic-inch flathead V8 producing 110 horsepower, backed by a three-speed manual with the shifter on the steering column. He was particularly proud of the power steering, an option novel enough that he described it twice. The steering wheel carried Ford’s golden-anniversary emblem, a little reminder that the company founded in 1903 had reached fifty just as Tommy had reached the age when spending a substantial portion of one’s income on a convertible seemed less like irresponsibility than destiny.
Evelyn’s father listened without visible enthusiasm.
“Does it have brakes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Use ’em.”
That concluded his inspection.
Evelyn came through the screen door wearing a summer dress and carrying the cardigan her mother had insisted she take despite the temperature being somewhere north of ninety. When she climbed into the Ford, she immediately noticed the smell: vinyl and rubber, fresh paint, gasoline, hot metal and that other indefinable scent belonging only to new automobiles before they accumulated children, cigarettes, spilled coffee, dog hair and life.
Tommy selected first gear.
The cardigan remained folded between them for approximately twelve minutes.
After that she put it on the floor.
By the end of the summer, everybody who knew Tommy Carlisle knew the white Ford, and everybody who knew the white Ford knew Evelyn. The Sunliner became part of their courtship without either of them deciding that it should. They drove to movies, drove for hamburgers and sometimes drove beyond town after dark for no better reason than gasoline was cheap enough that nowhere could still be considered a destination. The bench seat assisted matters considerably. Detroit had not yet embraced the idea that young couples should be separated by consoles, cup holders and enough electronic equipment to guide a missile. Evelyn began June sitting beside the passenger door. By August she had migrated considerably toward the center.
At night Tommy steered with his left hand while his right arm rested along the seat behind her. The flathead hummed beneath the hood, the radio faded in and out, and the West Texas sky filled everything above the windshield. Sometimes they talked about places they wanted to see. Sometimes Tommy turned off the radio and neither spoke at all. Those were the evenings Evelyn remembered most clearly decades later: her head against his shoulder, the smell of warm upholstery and dust, the wind moving across the open car, and the highway appearing from darkness only as far as the headlights could reach.
At eighteen, that seemed far enough.
The Ford was not perfect, which was fortunate because neither was Tommy. One July afternoon it vapor-locked outside town and left them beside the highway beneath a sun capable of cooking meat. Tommy raised the hood while Evelyn sat on the front fender.
“Can you fix it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what’s wrong?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know you can fix it?”
Tommy looked toward Fort Stockton shimmering in the distance.
“Because I’m not walking back.”
He eventually got the Ford running, although cooling gasoline probably deserved more credit than he did. Another afternoon he taught Evelyn to drive. She stalled the Sunliner six times while attempting to coordinate clutch, throttle and column shifter, and Tommy made the mistake of explaining on the sixth attempt what he had already explained after the fifth.
“You’re letting the clutch out too fast.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
The engine died.
Evelyn looked at him.
“Say it.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything.”
“Good.”
The seventh attempt was conducted in silence and went considerably better.
For the next two years the white Sunliner accumulated miles and memories in approximately equal measure. There were dances, movies, summer evenings, a thunderstorm that caught them with the top down and a small gouge in the passenger side of the dashboard caused by Evelyn’s compact during an argument in which Tommy made the tactical error of observing that Evelyn’s mother might have been right about something.
By 1955, people had begun asking when they were getting married. Nobody asked whether they intended to marry because that part had already been decided on their behalf. Courtship in Fort Stockton was regarded as a temporary administrative condition expected to conclude in matrimony, scandal or relocation.
For Tommy and Evelyn, it was relocation.
Tommy’s uncle had gone to California and written back about work. Los Angeles was expanding. Aircraft plants needed men. Construction crews needed men. Subdivisions were spreading across land that had recently grown oranges, and America seemed to be pouring westward behind steering wheels with radios playing and suitcases tied into trunks. Tommy began talking about California first as an interesting possibility, then as a plan, and finally as though his life had already moved there and only his body remained in Fort Stockton.
He wanted Evelyn to go.
Evelyn wanted Tommy to stay.
Neither request seemed unreasonable to the person making it.
At first they discussed the matter carefully. Then they argued. Eventually the same sentences appeared so often they no longer required thought.
“My family is here.”
“We can visit.”
“My life is here.”
“We can make another one.”
“I don’t want another one.”
Tommy was quiet.
“I do.”
There it was.
No infidelity. No betrayal. No villain. Just two young people who had reached a fork in the road and discovered that neither could follow the other without eventually resenting having done so. Evelyn sometimes wished in later years that Tommy had done something terrible. A terrible thing could have been hated or forgiven.
Instead, he wanted California.
She wanted home.
Love had encountered geography and discovered geography had a vote.
August 17, 1956, was the last time Evelyn rode in the Sunliner. Tommy was leaving Monday, and they drove beyond Fort Stockton after dark along one of the roads they had traveled dozens of times. The same flathead worked beneath the hood. The same stars spread above the windshield. The same bench seat stretched between the doors. But Evelyn sat close to the passenger side again, three years of courtship erased in eighteen inches of upholstery.
Tommy pulled onto the shoulder and left the engine running. Beyond the headlights was West Texas darkness, enormous and indifferent.
“Come with me.”
Evelyn stared ahead.
“No.”
“Evelyn.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
She knew he was right.
“I won’t.”
That was the truth.
Tommy nodded and put the Ford into gear.
Neither spoke on the drive back.
When they reached her parents’ house, Evelyn remained seated for several seconds. Tommy turned toward her, and for the last time she saw the young man who had arrived three summers earlier with a new Ford and absolute confidence that the road ahead would take him wherever he wanted to go.
He kissed her.
Not desperately.
That would have been easier.
It was gentle and familiar, the kiss of two people who still loved one another and had discovered that love did not settle every argument.
Evelyn stepped onto the pavement.
Tommy said her name.
She nearly turned around.
For the next seventy years she would remember nearly turning around.
She didn’t.
Behind her came first gear, then second, then third. The flathead faded down the street until there was nothing left to hear.
Evelyn never saw Tommy Carlisle again.
It was white when she left it.
Life, being considerably less interested in symbolism than people are, continued.
Evelyn married Robert Mercer in 1961. He was a good man, which sounded like faint praise only to people who had never spent forty-nine years married to one. They had three children, seven grandchildren, a mortgage, vacations, illnesses, graduations, arguments about children, arguments about thermostats and thousands of ordinary evenings whose value neither fully understood while they were happening.
Robert died in 2010.
Evelyn missed him every day.
That did not mean she had forgotten Tommy. Human beings like to imagine the heart as a room with one chair because it makes love easier to explain. Evelyn had lived long enough to know better. The heart was a house. Some people occupied entire rooms. Some stayed briefly. Some left. Some died but remained anyway. And occasionally, after decades had passed, a door opened unexpectedly and you discovered something sitting exactly where you had left it.
Which was how Evelyn found herself standing inside the Klip-N-Dye with half a haircut, staring through the window at a red 1953 Ford.
Trixie came alongside her.
“You really think that’s the same car?”
Evelyn nodded.
“How can you possibly know?”
Evelyn pointed toward the passenger side of the dashboard.
“That little gouge.”
Trixie leaned closer.
“I did that.”
“You damaged his car?”
“I threw my compact at him.”
“What’d he do?”
“Said my mother was right.”
Trixie considered the matter.
“Justifiable.”
They went outside.
The owner returned a few minutes later carrying a paper sack and found two women examining his automobile, one of whom appeared to have fled a beauty shop during an emergency evacuation. He listened as Evelyn asked where he had acquired the Ford, and one question led to another. Old cars rarely come with complete biographies. They accumulate titles, receipts, registrations, photographs and stories whose accuracy declines slightly with each retelling.
Then one name surfaced.
Carlisle.
Evelyn closed her eyes.
“Tommy.”
The owner looked at her. “You knew him?”
Trixie folded her arms.
“She threw things at him.”
What Evelyn learned next surprised her. Tommy had not kept the Ford. Somewhere in the years after leaving Texas, he sold it. After that came another owner and then another. Eventually somebody repainted the Sandstone White body red. The interior was redone. The continental kit appeared. An overdrive transmission was added. Parts wore out and were replaced. Chrome aged. Small bubbles began rising beneath portions of the finish as corrosion quietly reminded everyone that restoration merely slows time down; it does not defeat it.
For seventy years Evelyn had occasionally pictured Tommy driving the white Ford somewhere in California, perhaps beside the Pacific, perhaps with another woman sitting where she had once sat. Evelyn had intermittently disliked that imaginary woman since the Eisenhower administration.
She had never existed.
Or at least not in that Ford.
Tommy and the Sunliner had separated too.
Evelyn had preserved the automobile in memory as though it belonged permanently to August 1956, frozen white beneath a West Texas moon with Tommy behind the wheel. But the Ford had not stopped simply because her part in its story had ended. It had gone on without her and without Tommy. Other people had sat on its seat, gripped its steering wheel, shifted its transmission, lowered its top, cursed it when it failed to start and smiled when strangers admired it.
The Ford had lived a life.
So had she.
The owner opened the passenger door.
“Would you like to sit in it?”
Evelyn hesitated.
Trixie did not.
“She’d like a ride.”
“Trixie.”
“You walked out with half a haircut. We’re beyond caution.”
The owner smiled. “I’d be happy to.”
Getting into the Sunliner required more effort at eighty-seven than it had at eighteen. Evelyn lowered herself onto the seat and sat with both hands in her lap. The upholstery was different. The paint beyond the windshield was wrong. The transmission had changed. The continental spare had not been there when Tommy owned it.
Then she reached toward the dashboard.
Her finger found the gouge.
Still there.
Paint changed. Upholstery changed. Owners changed. Tommy was gone. Robert was gone. Her parents were gone. Most of the Fort Stockton she had known in 1953 existed only in photographs and in the memories of people disappearing a little faster every year.
But the mark from her compact remained.
Evelyn began to laugh.
Not a polite laugh. She laughed until tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.
Trixie leaned over the passenger door.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to come?”
“No.”
“Good. I’ve got an eleven-thirty.”
Trixie turned toward the shop.
“And bring the other half of your head with you.”
The owner turned the key. The starter engaged, the engine rolled twice, and the flathead caught.
Evelyn stopped laughing.
There it was.
Not precisely the same. No machine sounds exactly as it did seventy years earlier, just as no voice does and no town does and no person does.
But close enough.
For one impossible second, her hands were eighteen again.
The Ford pulled away from the curb. People looked because people will look at a red 1953 Ford Crestline Sunliner under ordinary circumstances, and an eighty-seven-year-old woman riding in one with half a haircut improved the spectacle considerably. Evelyn rested her arm along the door while the October wind undid whatever progress Trixie had made. They passed buildings that had not existed when Tommy owned the car and vacant lots where places Evelyn remembered had disappeared. The town had changed gradually enough that nobody noticed until something old returned and provided a ruler.
At a traffic light, the Ford settled into its familiar idle.
Evelyn closed her eyes.
For an instant she could smell warm vinyl and gasoline, dust and summer air. She could hear a radio fading somewhere beyond town. She could feel a clutch pedal beneath her shoe and hear Tommy telling her she was letting it out too quickly.
She smiled.
The light changed.
Evelyn understood then that she had spent much of her life misunderstanding memory. She had thought remembering something meant wanting it back. But she did not want August 1956 back. She would not trade Robert, her children, her grandchildren or forty-nine years of marriage for another chance to sit beside Tommy Carlisle beneath a West Texas sky.
She only wanted that summer to have been real.
It was.
That was enough.
The Sunliner turned back toward the Klip-N-Dye. Through the window Evelyn could see Trixie working on her eleven-thirty, occasionally glancing toward the street to make certain her unfinished ten-thirty had not escaped to California after all.
Evelyn looked down the long red hood and ran one hand along the top of the door.
“I still liked it better white.”
The owner laughed.
And somewhere beneath the red paint, beneath primer and decades of repairs, weather and changing hands, there was almost certainly a patch of Sandstone White hidden inside a door jamb or underneath a piece of trim where nobody had bothered to remove it. Not enough to make the Ford white again. Not enough to make Evelyn eighteen. Not enough to bring Tommy back or change the choice either of them had made seventy years before.
Just enough to prove that once it had been white.
Once she had been eighteen.
Once there had been a boy named Tommy Carlisle who loved her.
And once, for three summers, the road ahead had only needed to reach as far as the headlights.
