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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DRAW ME LIKE ONE OF YOUR FRENCH CARS
Rose was an uppity rich girl from the Montrose section of Houston. Born beautiful. Grew up wealthy. Had an attitude. Jack was a devil-may-care rogue from Fort Stockton who lived by the seat of his pants, romancing young girls and living in an old cabin about fifty yards off the shore of Lake Leon. Gambled for his income. Had…
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IT’S A BIRD. IT’S A PLANE. IT’S….
So there I was, out in the woods behind the garage harvesting mushrooms in preparation to sit down and write the next Thad Gunter series when the phone rings. Now the fact that I even had the phone on me was a miracle. Normally I’m not wearing pants when it’s time for the harvest. But Mila said…
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LAST CHANCE
Everybody wandered into the Grounds for Divorce after the service, numb and reflective. That’s what funerals do. They slap everyone upside the head with reminders of their own mortality, while they grieve folks unexpectedly gone in the blink of an eye. Parker McHale’s Hollywood studio shipped in a special hearse for the service. It was the same one…
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ONLY BY CHANCE, Part III
In a way, Eileen Parker and Chance Collinsworth got together because of Pastor Peterson. He would never lay claim to that distinction, but the dots do connect. After taking her Maserati out to the old McCullough place so Eileen could pay her last respects to where Mason’s ashes had been scattered, he could have insisted that Eileen take…
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ONLY BY CHANCE, Part II
Chance Collinsworth stayed in the Pacific Northwest for a while. He went into a partnership with someone he met at a car show and became an organic farmer in Oregon for a while, but never really embraced the business and sold out to his partner sometime in 1978 or ’79. Word filtered back to Fort Stockton that…
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ONLY BY CHANCE, Part I
Eileen hadn’t come back to town for Mason’s memorial service. She knew there’d be press if she showed up. There were too many memories she wanted to leave right where they were. Dredging them up under a cloud of grief in front of an audience hungry to make up their own stories about the genesis of her tears…
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FROM THE BACK OF THE BERMUDA, 8/18/2024
Okay, let’s set the record straight on a couple things. First, as has been well documented (to death some would probably say), the reasons for my fondness for 1960 Fords can be traced back to the one I had for my first car as a high school senior. The car Buttercup and I dated in, got married in,…
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A CANADIAN TOWING THE LINE
This is the exact set-up Liam Lucas drove when he moved down from Canada to Fort Stockton and went to work over at the ESSO station. The tow truck would gather a small crowd every time he stopped somewhere; folks in town just weren’t used to seeing a truck with Mercury badges on it, but…
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FORT STOCKTON IN THE LIGHT OF MORNING
It was a morning that was as muggy as it was hot, not even the hint of a breeze pushing in past the Venetian blinds. The locusts outside, normally are doing everything they can to get laid before noon, weren’t even flapping their wings to attract a mate. The air was thick and Buttercup was nowhere to…
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FORT STOCKTON AFTER DARK, Chapter 4
Gunter didn’t have to wait long. The subject was out the front door of her modern mansion in Morningwood Estates, pressing the button on the Door-O-Matic keypad nestled in the cigarette case at the bottom of her purse, and gracefully gliding into the cabin. She was leaving the house early, just as his intel had predicted. She…