And I sat down on the concrete, wiping my hands on my coveralls, because it was not the thing a man braces for when he cuts a hidden package off the frame of a car.
Under the plastic, under the tape, was a small wooden box, sanded and finished by hand, and screwed to the top of it was a little brass plate. It read a woman name, two dates about seventy years apart, and under that three words: She rides along. I did not need to open it to know what it was. Some man had strapped his late wife ashes up under that old Crown Vic so she would ride everywhere he went, and then somewhere down the road the car got sold and she went right along with it, to a lot in Anniston, and then to Earl, and rode around three years under a stranger with not one of us the wiser.
I did not tell Earl the cold way I had been thinking about it a minute before. I told him plain what it was, and that old boy took his cap off right there in my lobby, boiled peanuts and all. We agreed the only thing to do was find the family.
The paperwork on the car led me back through the Anniston lot to a name and an old address, and from there to a daughter. Her father was a retired railroad man named Clyde who had lost his wife, June, going on four years back, after fifty-one years married. She told me her daddy drove that Crown Vic and would not part with it for anything, and when his mind started to slip and they had to move him into a home, the family sold the car to help cover it, never once knowing what was bolted up underneath. She had spent two years believing her mother ashes were lost for good. She had cried over it more than the once.
Clyde was still living, in a care home right there in Gadsden. His daughter asked would I come with her to carry June back to him, seeing as I was the one who found her, and I said I would be honored, though I felt strange about it, a grease-handed stranger walking into the middle of something so tender.
He was in a wheelchair by the window when we came in. His daughter knelt down and set that little wooden box in his hands and told him soft what it was. It took a second to land on him. Then that old man drew it up against his chest and said, clear as a bell, in a voice gone thin with the years, There you are. I have been looking all over for you.
His daughter was crying, and I will not pretend I was not too, standing there in my shop cap with the grease still under my nails. Fifty-one years that man loved that woman, enough to carry her under his car so she would never be more than a few feet from him, and for four long years he believed he had lost even that much of her. And here she was, come home by way of a rusted-out fuel tank and a nosy mechanic.
Twenty-two years I have run that shop and figured I had seen everything a car can hide. I was wrong. Some of the things that ride around under our feet are not trouble at all. Sometimes they are just love, waiting on a way back home.