And I looked inside that purse, and my hand started to shake, because right on top, under the flap, was a little stack of photographs, and every one was a woman and a baby, and the woman was scared in a way that does not usually come across in a picture but came across plain in these.
Under the photos was a wallet. A drivers license, a young woman, an address two counties over. Forty dollars. A hospital card. And down in the very bottom of that purse, wrapped in a paper towel, a thin gold ring with a little chip of a stone, the kind of ring that is not worth much to anybody but the one it belongs to.
I will be honest, my mind went to a dark place standing in that back row with my flashlight. A packed bag. A car seat. A scared woman in a photo. A car left with the door hanging open on a county road. You hear stories. I about called the sheriff right then. But something told me to try the license first.
The address was long dead. But the name was not a common one, and thirty-four years of running a tow yard teaches you how to find people who do not want to be found, or who got lost by accident. It took me a week. When I finally got a number that rang through, a woman answered, and I said the name off that license, and there was a long silence, and then she said, real careful, that she had not gone by that name in a long time.
She was alive. That was the first thing, and it about put me on the floor with the relief of it. She was alive, and she was well, and she was safe, and had been for years. That gray sedan had sat in my back row since spring, but the night she walked away from it went back a good deal further than that. She told me only what she wanted to and I did not push, but the shape of it was plain enough. A bad marriage. A worse night. A young mother who put her baby in a car seat and drove off into the dark with a bag she packed in ten minutes, and got herself to a shelter three states off, and never once looked back, not even for her own car, because looking back was the one thing she could not afford to do.
I left everything in that car because everything in that car could be replaced. Getting the two of us out could not.
She had made it. That baby in the photos is grown now, off at college, safe and whole and never knew a day of what her mother carried her out of. The woman built a good life under a new name, and I was purely glad to have been wrong about the dark place my mind went.
She did not want the car. But there was the one thing. That thin gold ring in the bottom of the purse had belonged to her own mother, the only piece of her mother she had left in this world, and she had grieved it as gone for years. I mailed it to her myself, insured and packed careful. She called me the day it came, a grown woman crying on the phone to a stranger over a five-dollar ring, telling me I had given her back the only piece of her mama she had. Thirty-four years I have popped trunks and cleared out cars and figured nothing much could move me anymore. That one did.