STORIES
If our lives are a book, the cars we drive define the chapters.
These are stories featuring cars, trucks, and even RVs that played a role in the lives of the people who owned or drove them. Many are set in Fort Stockton, Texas and involve a cast of characters in and around the dusty southwest Texas town. A lot of the stories are shared around the table at The Grounds for Divorce, where the ‘regulars’ meet.
Pull up a chair and let Lucinda pour you a hot cuppa joe and enjoy.
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RUSTY, RED & OLIVE
By the time Rusty Hammer crossed into Kansas, he had developed the uneasy suspicion that the road had finished with him before he had finished with the road. That was not a complaint. The road had been generous, in its own sideways fashion. It had given him lakes in Minnesota, trout water in Wyoming, hard…
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A FURY OF FOLGERS
Nobody ever accused Gus Godley of being a visionary, though there was a period of roughly six months in 1960 when several vice presidents at Chrysler unknowingly credited him with being one. Gus never learned about that part. He was too busy emptying wastebaskets. Like many stories worth telling in Fort Stockton, this one began…
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THE LAST LAUGH
In the summer of 1969, when Fort Stockton was still small enough for a man’s reputation to beat him to the barbershop but large enough for him to pretend it had not, Hollis Ray Briscoe discovered that there were only so many times a wife could be expected to hear the words “that is not…
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THE REALIZATION
By the time Rusty Hammer found himself rolling into Hayward, Wisconsin, he had stopped pretending he knew exactly where he was going. That wasn’t to say he’d become irresponsible. Rusty had never been irresponsible a day in his life. Men who spent forty years running hardware stores, paying mortgages, raising children, and attending church committee…
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FAKING IT
The slow days at Grounds for Divorce had their own kind of weather. They settled over the café after lunch, somewhere between the last chicken-fried steak and the first old man who wandered in pretending he had not already had four cups of coffee at home. The ceiling fans turned with that lazy confidence only…
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THAT EXPLAINS IT
The bell over the door at Grounds for Divorce jingled at precisely 7:12 on a Tuesday morning, which was about the time Fort Stockton’s regular population stopped pretending it was going to accomplish anything productive before lunch. The big round table in the middle of the café was already occupied. Rex Hall had the morning…
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INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE
The first thing anybody noticed was that Dale Kerstetter’s truck was still sitting in the parking lot. In Fort Stockton, that alone was enough to make people uneasy. Vehicles told stories. Everybody knew that. A truck sitting somewhere it shouldn’t be was often more revealing than the people who drove it. By breakfast the next…
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TURNING THE CORNER
The end of the 1970s had not been particularly kind to Rusty Hammer Sr. If you sat with him at the counter at Grounds for Divorce or caught him leaning against a pallet of fertilizer outside Rusty Hammer Hardware, he probably wouldn’t have described it as hardship. Men of his generation rarely did. They had…
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THE RECKONING
Friday afternoons at Rusty Hammer Hardware possessed a particular kind of fatigue. By five o’clock, the building felt as though it had spent the entire week carrying things. Lumber. Feed sacks. Water heaters. Paint cans. Boxes of nails. Customers who wanted advice. Customers who did not want advice but got it anyway. The old hardware…
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HANGING AROUND AT THE GFD
The breakfast crowd at Grounds for Divorce had settled into its usual weekday formation, which resembled a military occupation only slightly less organized than the Allied invasion of Europe. Lucinda floated between tables with a coffee pot in one hand and a look on her face that suggested she had already heard three bad ideas…