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.
-
RED STEEL AND BORROWED HOPE
They took delivery of the truck on a morning that felt better than it had any right to. The sky over West Texas had finally learned some manners. For the first time in years, the wind moved without malice, lifting nothing more dangerous than a stray scrap of paper or the smell of coffee drifting…
-
THE SPICY NOODLE
Nobody in Fort Stockton could quite agree on where Tony Pippiline came from, and that alone made him suspicious. Depending on who you asked—and how many glasses of house red they’d already had—Tony was either from the Tuscany region of Italy or from Newbury Park, California, which everyone agreed sounded like a subdivision with an…
-
CLOSING TIME
By the time the Lucky Lady Lounge decided it had had enough of the day, it was well past midnight and pretending not to notice. The neon out front still buzzed like a cicada with a nicotine habit, but inside the place had gone thin and hollow, the way bars do when they’re finished with…
-
RUBIES AND DELI CUTS
Chad had never thought of Dallas as a destination. It was a requirement. The email from the Lone Star Grocery Management Association arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, wedged between a reminder about shrinkage reporting and a passive-aggressive memo about someone—never named—forgetting to rotate the smoked turkey. The subject line read LSGMA Annual Convention – Dallas,…
-
DEATH BY A THOUSAND STINGS
The first thing Coach Dykstra noticed wasn’t the noise. It wasn’t the laughter, or the scrape of sneakers on cold concrete, or the way the late-afternoon sun slanted through the gym windows at Jim Bowie High School and turned everything the color of old varnish and unresolved business. It was the bus. It came easing…
-
SIN IN DARK SHADES OF GRAY
It started, as most Fort Stockton legends do, with a delivery driver who looked like he’d been awake since the Carter administration and a flatbed trailer easing down Dickinson Boulevard like it was carrying plutonium. Only this wasn’t plutonium. This was a 1961 Lincoln Continental sedan—slab-sided, low-slung, and so unreasonably calm it made the courthouse…
-
TALL COTTON, BLUE VEINS
Rusty Hammer did not ask for blue cheese lightly. At the Grounds for Divorce, requests carried weight. Ranchero sauce requests were expected. Extra tortillas were routine. Asking for blue cheese on huevos rancheros, however, was a curveball that caused Lucinda to pause mid-pour, the Bunn-O-Matic hissing like it had opinions. “You sure?” she asked. “That’s…
-
THE GOODMAN EDITION
Late-1970s Detroit had a way of making a man feel either important or disposable, depending on which elevator he rode and how far it climbed. At the very top of the General Motors World Headquarters, above the smog, above the labor unrest, above the imported cars nibbling at the edges of American pride like termites…
-
THE WEEKEND THE NAUGHTY PINE ALMOST GOT A RECORD DEAL
By Friday afternoon, Fort Stockton had the look it gets right before something goes sideways. The sun sat up there like a brass sheriff’s badge, stern and shiny, and the wind came off the Davis Mountains carrying that dry perfume of creosote, warm asphalt, and faint regret. You could feel it in the courthouse square,…
-
BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
“If Brother Bob claimed this was the opening act of the apocalypse, I wouldn’t have a very strong argument to prove him wrong. Of course, I’d feel obligated to run it past Pastor Peterson first, just to get a proper ecclesiastical reading. Maybe talk it over with Sister Thelma across a cup of Folgers, since…