He washed it the way he had washed Engine 4 every Sunday morning for thirty years, with method and patience, starting at the roof and working down, rinsing the sponge often, talking under his breath the way old men talk to things they love when they think no one is listening. He told the car about the letter. He told it Diane Kessler could go straight to hell. He dried it with the chamois Eleanor had kept in the trunk, and when he was done the red paint caught the afternoon sun and threw it back, faded but defiant, and Harold stood in the driveway with his hands on his hips and his shirt stuck to his back, and for the first time in nineteen months he opened the driver's door and sat behind the wheel.
The seat sighed under him. The smell of the interior rose up around him, vinyl and old gasoline and, impossibly, faintly, Eleanor's perfume, the lily-of-the-valley dusting powder she had used every day of her adult life, gone from the stores for a decade but lingering here, in the seams of the upholstery, where time moved slower. On the dashboard sat the little brass compass she had glued there in 1975 after they got lost in the Poconos, its needle trembling toward north. In the glove box was the registration, expired, and a packet of love letters he had written her from the fire academy, tied with a ribbon gone brittle. Harold put his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, the way the instructor had taught him when he was seventeen, and he closed his eyes, and for a minute he was twenty-six again and Eleanor was beside him with her bare feet on the dashboard, which she knew drove him crazy, laughing at the radio, and the whole long golden road of their life was still ahead of them, unrolled like a map.
He did not cry. Harold Brennan had cried exactly twice in his adult life, once when his daughter was born and once when Eleanor died, and he had decided, with the grim arithmetic of old men, that he was finished with it. He got out of the car and closed the door gently, the way you close the door of a room where someone is sleeping, and he went inside and took the letter out of the drawer and read it a third time, and then he did what he had always done when faced with a problem bigger than his hands: he made a list.
The list said: 1. Call DMV about registration. 2. Call Marty about the tires. 3. Find out what 14-C actually says. Marty Kowalski had been his engineer at the firehouse, his driver, his friend for fifty years, and Marty still turned a wrench in his garage two streets over and would know what it cost to make the Mustang road-legal again. Harold called the DMV first and waited on hold for forty-one minutes listening to a recorded message about the convenience of their website, and when he finally reached a human being he learned that registering a vehicle that had sat unregistered for nineteen months would require an inspection, back fees, a penalty, and a smog exemption form for a classic car, and he wrote all of this down in his careful block printing. He called Marty, who said, Hal, bring her over, we'll put her on the lift, no charge, you know that, and Harold said he knew that and thanked him anyway. He found his copy of the covenants in the filing cabinet, a document as thick as a phone book that he had never read, and he looked up Section 14-C, which said that inoperable vehicles must be stored in enclosed garages and not visible from the street, and he measured his driveway with a tape measure and discovered that the Mustang, which had sat in that exact spot for forty-four years, was eleven inches closer to the sidewalk than the current setback allowed, because the rules had been rewritten twice since he poured the concrete.