Driving West at Sunset

Sabrina carried the box from the nursing home to her car and set it down on the passenger seat. She held a hand protectively in front of it as she drove, bracing it like a small child that might slide onto the floor if she took a corner too fast. When she arrived at her father’s empty apartment, she sat idling in the old Buick, the left blinker still clicking loudly.

The car had belonged to her grandfather. When she was a little girl sitting in the back seat, she would count the blinker clicks while they waited to turn at a stoplight. There was such silence in the car with her grandfather. It was the same way inside his apartment. She would sit on his scratchy couch hour after hour, watching the numbers on the clock roll by. This is what her father had grown up with, she thought.

Sabrina pulled her dad’s box onto her lap and slowly unfolded the lid, straining to catch his scent of Benson and Hedges mingled with cinnamon gum. She found her dad’s little black notebook in the box and pressed it up to her face, desperate to inhale it, hearing his gravelly laugh in the smell of the pages. Her mind snatched at remembered fragments of time with her father. The day when she was seven and her father took her to the supermarket and let her pick out a box of crackers and a Coke and took her to the park to fly a kite. Her mother never did things like that.

Sabrina slowly turned the pages of the notebook, staggered by the amount of phone numbers and addresses that her dad had accumulated over the years. Even when someone died, he could never bring himself to cross out their name in his notebook. Flipping to the end, Sabrina found a section of businesses phone numbers next to her dad’s bartering codes. When she was nine, her dad had pushed the beer cans and ashtrays on the kitchen table aside and spread out the notebook of his codes, insisting that she start memorizing them.

Her father collected his most precious bartering items during his years working on the reservations in Arizona. He had the pride of a transient who was often mistaken for a native, and people trusted him easily. He painted a lot and drank a lot and went through a lot of girlfriends in those years. He would retell the stories of those days often, grinning and banging his fist on the table of whatever diner they were in, making the silverware jump.

“Pay ahead,” her dad would nod, lighting a fresh cigarette from the tip of the one he was just finishing. He was always answering questions that hadn’t been asked. It was his policy to have people owe him. In the last month of his life, Sabrina’s dad had been to see a chiropractor that wasn’t covered by his insurance. He’d been complaining that his head felt too heavy for his neck. Sabrina located the chiropractor’s name in her dad’s notebook. The code indicated that her father had paid for a year of visits in advance with something valuable.

Sabrina drove to the chiropractor’s office and stood around the waiting room looking at the art. None of it was her dad’s style. A side door swung open, and Sabrina recognized a painting hanging in the hallway. It was an abstract piece, different from anything her father had ever done. It had hung on the living room wall of her dad’s rented house on the reservation for years.

Every summer Sabrina spent on the reservation, she looked for answers in that painting. At night she would sit up in bed, unable to sleep, missing her mother, and knowing that her mother was relieved to be free of her for the summer. There was a terrifying emptiness to the hot wind that would blow through the house. During the day stark clouds of hope would fall away treacherously as she rode her bike through the dust.

A woman wearing a pink scarf on her head was leaving the examining area, and Sabrina rushed to hold the waiting room door open for her. In what felt like one movement, Sabrina slipped behind the woman into the hallway, took the painting down, and walked out with it tucked under her arm like a large pocketbook.

After her dad moved away from the reservation, the painting sat in his garage behind the coffee cans full of nails. Her dad had a pool then, and it seemed like they were always at the supermarket getting charcoal and steaks and booze. Once he lit up a cigarette while browsing through the meat section. “Dad, you can’t smoke in here,” Sabrina had said, afraid to tell her father about rules that belonged to other people. He smiled and kept handling the steaks with the cigarette in his hand. “This isn’t California,” he said.

Out by the pool one night, her dad had five martinis before the coals were even ready. He crashed into the house looking for the meat, lurching into door frames as he made his way into the kitchen. If her dad’s friends had been over, there would have been laughter and jokes. With only Sabrina there, the effects of the liquor died in him, leaving a stunned silence that she remembered from childhood.

One year when the summer was over and her dad had to drive her back home to California, they didn’t get on the road until late in the afternoon. Her dad had wanted to drive his new convertible with the top down in the cooler part of the day. As they headed west along the dusty highway at 5:00 o’clock, her father cursed from behind his sunglasses, angry at being blinded by the setting sun. Over and over he repeated that this was the biggest mistake of his life, driving west at sunset. “It’s okay,” Sabrina said, sitting sideways in the passenger seat, thinking that he was apologizing to her. Her dad looked over at her, surprised. “Yeah, it’s fine for you,” he snapped. “You’re not driving.” She kept quiet after that, and when it was finally dark enough for the highway lights to come on, her dad sighed and tore off his sunglasses.

Sabrina drove to the supermarket parking lot near her dad’s old house to examine the painting. She turned it over to look for his customary scrawl on the back. Instead she found the neatly printed name Jim. Jim had been the best man at her parents’ wedding. Sabrina was often forced together with his son Tommy while her father and Jim drank and talked and painted in the backyard. One day there had been an unexplained rift between her father and Jim after her parents split up, and Sabrina never saw Jim or Tommy again. “Some people you just lose touch with,” was all her father would say about it as he squinted through his personal cloud of smoke.

She opened her dad’s black notebook again and found the page with Jim’s address. Her dad had written Tommy’s name in blue ink next to Jim’s. That meant Jim had died. Her father always used blue ink to put in a new contact’s name when his original contact died.

Sabrina drove through the familiar neighborhood where Jim had lived and parked down the street from his house to survey the block. She looked for an indication of what to expect. She hadn’t seen Tommy since she was ten. Back then he always smelled like the boiled hot dogs they sold at the community pool, and he never wore shoes. Sabrina struggled to pull the painting out of the front seat. It seemed heavier now, more awkward.

At Jim’s house, she could see movement behind the sheer living room curtains after she rang the doorbell. A young boy with bare feet appeared behind the screen door. “I’m not supposed to open the door,” he told her. Then he looked at the painting and cried, “Dad, I found it!”

“No, I found it,” Sabrina corrected him. She instantly regretted it when she saw how the words stung him. “I stole it,” she said gently and smiled at the boy, tilting the painting so he could see it better. The boy shrugged and walked back into the shadows of the house, unimpressed. A man in shorts and a T-shirt jogged clumsily up to the door. It was Tommy, his nostrils flaring the way they used to when they rode bikes together.

Tommy stood quietly and looked at Sabrina like someone who was used to waiting for things. He eyed the painting. “I remember when my dad painted that in your backyard,” he said. “It was --” he let the words fall away, realizing what must have happened for Sabrina to have the painting. “I’m sorry.”

Sabrina had been hoping Tommy would invite her in, but suddenly she felt like a traitor. Her legs ached to run back to the car. Tommy reached out for the painting, and Sabrina felt herself let go of it. She turned toward the street.

“Hold up,” Tommy said. It was something he used to shout when she would get ahead of him on her bike. “Hold up,” he’d yell from half a block away. He’d smile the whole time he furiously pedaled to catch up with her because she would turn around and watch him get closer.

Tommy went to a chest of drawers in the living room and got out a wrinkled manila envelope. He handed it to Sabrina. “My dad left instructions to give this to your dad if he ever brought back the painting. I guess it belongs to you now.” The envelope was already open, and it looked like it had been sifted through many times. Sabrina peered into it. Inside were old photos of her dad and Jim, pictures of them from college and from the backyard days when they were painting all the time, and a photo of Tommy and Sabrina on their bikes in front of her old house, scowling. At the very bottom of the envelope were stacks of neatly wrapped $100 bills.

“Thanks,” Sabrina said. She kept rummaging through the envelope so she wouldn’t have to meet Tommy’s eyes. In her mind, she was already back in her dad’s old apartment right next to the liquor store counting the money.

“There’s $20,000 in there,” Tommy said, unashamed that he knew. Sabrina kept her face neutral. It was an expression she’d perfected as a child. “Thanks,” she said again.

She fished a piece of gum out of her purse and tore it in half, a habit she’d picked up from her mother. Even when her mother had a brand new pack of gum, she would never give Sabrina a whole piece. She offered one half to the boy, who had crept up to Tommy’s side. He leaned into his father’s stomach. “I don’t like cinnamon,” he said.

“Right,” Sabrina nodded, as if she’d known this all along. The large envelope felt light as a feather under her arm. Now empty of the painting, Sabrina's arms began to ache, and she longed for the safety of her car. “Well, so long,” she said. Tommy smiled. They'd always said "so long" to each other growing up. They knew their dads would bring them together again, so there was never a reason to say goodbye.

Sabrina sprinted down Tommy's front steps towards the safety of her car. When she got to the driver's side, she looked up to see if Tommy was still watching her. He was. She forced herself to smile and waved at Tommy and his son with her arm high over her head like she was already a block away.

As she drove back to her father's apartment, Sabrina had the urge to go stand in front of every door her dad had ever lived behind and knock. For those few seconds of waiting, she could pretend that he would answer.