Eleanor Brennan had been twenty-two when Harold first saw her, standing on the bumper of a stalled Chevrolet on the shoulder of Route 9 in the rain, waving a white scarf at traffic like a flag of surrender, and Harold, nineteen and home on leave from the fire academy, had pulled over in his father's pickup and gotten soaked to the skin getting her car started, and she had kissed him on the cheek in gratitude and written her phone number on his wrist in eyeliner, and he had not washed that wrist for two days. She was a force of nature disguised as a kindergarten teacher, small and fierce and funny, with a laugh that could be heard from three rooms away and opinions she had never once kept to herself. She married him in 1968 in a dress she made herself, in a church full of firefighters who wept openly during the vows, and when anyone asked her, in later years, what the secret of a fifty-six-year marriage was, she would say, I married a man who runs toward fires, so I never had to wonder which way he'd run in a marriage.
The Mustang had been her idea entirely, and her rebellion, and her joy. In the spring of 1982, with Harold working doubles to cover a staffing shortage and Eleanor teaching thirty kindergarteners and raising their daughter on what felt like pennies, she had walked into a Ford dealership on a Saturday morning to look, just look, at the used cars, and she had seen the red fastback sitting in the corner of the lot with a SOLD sign leaning against the windshield, a sale that had fallen through that very morning when the buyer's financing collapsed. She test-drove it around the block and came back with her heart pounding and bought it on the spot with money she had been saving in a coffee can for a new refrigerator, and when Harold came home that night she was sitting on the hood waiting for him, and she said, Before you say a word, Harold Brennan, you should know I have never been so sure of anything in my life, and he opened his mouth and closed it and walked around the car twice and then got in and turned the key, and the V8 rumbled to life, and he looked at her through the open window and said, The refrigerator can wait.
The car became the third member of their family. Their daughter, Carol, learned to drive in it, stalling it seventeen times in the high school parking lot while Eleanor laughed and Harold gripped the dashboard. They drove it to the lake every summer, the trunk full of coolers and towels, Carol in the back seat with her feet out the window. They drove it to Carol's college graduation, Eleanor wearing a corsage and Harold wearing a tie he kept loosening. When Carol married and moved to Ohio, they drove the Mustang to the wedding, and Eleanor cried all the way there, and Harold pretended not to notice. The car carried groceries and Christmas trees and, once, a stray dog they named Biscuit who rode with his head out the window for eleven happy years. It carried them through the ordinary miracle of a life, mile by mile, and every dent had a story, and Eleanor could tell every one of them.
The dent in the left rear quarter panel was from 1987, when a shopping cart got loose in a parking lot during a windstorm. The scratch on the passenger door was from Carol's bicycle handlebar in 1990. The faint ring on the dashboard was from Eleanor's coffee mug, set down in the same spot every morning for thirty years. Harold knew these marks the way he knew the lines on Eleanor's hands. After she died, he would sometimes go out to the driveway and run his fingers over the dent from the shopping cart and feel her beside him, laughing about the wind, saying, Hal, it adds character, and he would stand there in the dark with his hand on the cold metal, and the grief would come up through the soles of his feet like groundwater.
Eleanor's last year had been hard in the way that everyone's last year is hard when the body begins its slow betrayal. It started with a cough that would not leave, and then there were doctors, and then there was a word, a terrible word, spoken gently in a room with beige walls, and then there were treatments that took her hair and her appetite but never, not once, her humor. She joked with the nurses. She graded her kindergarteners' papers from the hospital bed. She made Harold promise three things: that he would keep winding the hallway clock, that he would not let Carol worry about him, and that he would take the Mustang out once in a while and let her run, because cars, like people, die faster standing still. He had promised all three, and he had kept two of them, and the third had defeated him, because every time he thought about driving the car without her, his hands would shake too badly to turn the key.