After the storm blew through here in Galveston, I got called out to pull a car that had been shoved up against the seawall by the waves. Sitting crooked, half full of sand and saltwater, drivers door hanging wide open. I run a tow truck, been doing it fifteen years down here on the coast, and a car dragged around by a storm surge is not even unusual after a big blow. I figured it for a routine hook-and-haul. Log the VIN, drag it to the lot, done by lunch. Then I looked in the glovebox.
I only opened it to see if the registration was in there, so I would know who to call about their car. But there was something else in it, tucked behind the papers, and it stopped me cold standing there in the wind. It was the kind of thing a person keeps close, the kind of thing you do not walk away from and leave in a car. Not unless something went very wrong, very fast.
It was a small wooden urn. And that open door. Nobody leaves a car door hanging open in a storm on purpose. You leave it like that when you got out in a hurry. Or when the water took you.
I tossed the thing back on the seat, grabbed my radio, and started raising the Coast Guard, because whoever left this behind might still be out there in that water.
They ran it down fast off the plate. And here is the thing. The owner was fine. Safe. A woman named Delia, evacuated inland two days before the storm ever hit, sitting at her daughters place in San Antonio the whole time.
She had left the car parked by the seawall because that was her spot, hers and her husbands, where they had watched the water for forty years. The surge had come up higher than anyone called for and dragged the car off like a toy. The door blew open in the wind. Nobody was ever in it.
But the urn. The urn was her husband, gone eight months. She kept his ashes in the car because she could not stand to leave him home alone, drove him down to their spot by the water most evenings, and in the rush of evacuating with her heart in her throat she had forgotten he was still in the glovebox.
She had spent two days three hundred miles away sick with it, sure the Gulf had taken the last of him, that she had let the sea carry off her husband because she panicked and forgot.
It had not. I had him, sandy and salt-stained but whole, sitting in the cab of my tow truck.
I did not put that urn in the lot with the car. I drove it to San Antonio myself, three hundred miles, on my own dime, and I put Delias husband back in her hands on her daughters porch.
I thought the water got him. I thought I lost him twice. You drove my whole heart back to me.
She takes him down to a new spot now, up the coast, away from that seawall. Still every evening. Still the two of them, watching the water.