The Cart
My hands were shaking.
I stood in the Walmart parking lot on a Saturday afternoon in October with four bags of groceries hanging off my wrists and stared at my van.
A shopping cart was jammed against the driver’s side door.
Not resting against it. Not rolled into it by the wind. Jammed. Wedged at an angle so the front corner of its metal frame was pressed deep into the panel just below the window. The door was dented inward like somebody had punched it with a fist the size of a basketball.
Long silver scratches ran from the dent all the way back to the sliding door. Three of them. Parallel. Deep enough that I could see primer underneath the blue paint.
The side mirror was cracked.
I set the grocery bags down on the asphalt.
A carton of eggs. Milk. Two pounds of ground beef. Josie’s Goldfish crackers. Ben’s chicken nuggets in the shape of dinosaurs. A birthday card for my mother-in-law.
I walked around the cart. Slowly. Like it might move.
I touched the dent.
It was deep. Deeper than it looked. The metal was cold and buckled under my fingers.
It was a 2014 Honda Odyssey.
Blue. One hundred and sixty-one thousand miles. A cracked cup holder. A permanent smell of apple juice in the back row that no amount of shampoo could fix. Josie’s name scratched into the plastic of the third-row seat with a paper clip when she was five.
It wasn’t worth much. Maybe six thousand dollars.
But it was my father’s.
He bought it new in 2014. The year Josie was born. His first grandchild. He drove it off the lot in Springfield and straight to the hospital and parked it in the loading zone and walked into my room with a car seat already installed in the back.
“For the baby,” he said. “She’s going to need a good ride.”
He drove that van for eight years. To every one of Josie’s birthday parties. To Ben’s T-ball games. To Silver Dollar City every summer. To the hospital in the fall of 2022, when his heart started failing.
He died in January of 2023.
He left me the van.
I’d kept it perfect.
Not perfect, exactly. It was a minivan with two kids. But I’d kept it the way he would have. Oil changed every three thousand miles. Tires rotated. Washed every other Sunday.
Not one dent. Not one scratch. In three years. 