![]() The car was not so new as to be luxurious nor so old as to be bohemian. He was a professor, and that seemed to correlate with his relish for life's useful tasks: bundling old newspapers for recycling, scattering chemical pellets on the sidewalk when the weather turned icy, replacing lightbulbs, unclogging stopped sinks with a miniature plunger. Besides, Clay took pride in that kind of thing. ![]() ![]() Was it sexist, somehow, that Clay drove, and always did? Well: Amanda had no patience for the attendant sacraments of alternate-side-of-the-street parking and the twelve-thousand-mile checkup. There was news of an intensifying hurricane season, storms with fanciful names from a preapproved list. The windows were tinted with a protectant to keep cancer at bay. The sunlight on their arms was reassuring. Kids were always needing a Band-Aid, pink skin splitting like summer fruit. The car was Clay's domain, and he was lax enough that it accrued the talus of oats from granola bars bought in bulk, the unexplained tube sock, a subscription insert from the New Yorker, a twisted tissue, ossified with snot, that wisp of white plastic peeled from the back of a Band-Aid who knew when. Their gray car was a bell jar, a microclimate: air-conditioning, the funk of adolescence (sweat, feet, sebum), Amanda's French shampoo, the rustle of debris, for there always was that. ![]() It was all just to say no clouds were to be seen. ![]()
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