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was the whole neighborhood familiar with the car, a photograph of it would be in today’s paper. When Frank bought it and drove it home the men on the street slapped the hood and grinned, leaned in to sniff the interior, hit the horn and laughed. Laughed and laughed some more because its owner had to borrow a lawn mower every couple of weeks; because its owner had no screens in his windows and no working television; because two of his six porch posts had been painted white three months earlier, the rest still flaking yellow; because its owner sometimes slept behind the wheel of the car he’d traded in—all night—in front of his own house. And the women, who saw Mavis driving the children to the White Castle wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, flat-out stared before shaking their heads. As though they knew from the start that the Cadillac would someday be notorious.
    Creeping at twenty miles per hour, Mavis entered route 121, thankful for the shelter of darkness left. As she passed the County Hospital, a silent ambulance glided out of the driveway. A green cross in a field of white slid from brilliant emergency light into shadow. Fifteen times she had been a patient there—four times for childbirth. During the next-to-last admission, when the twins were due, Mavis’ mother came from New Jersey to help out. She kept house and minded the other children for three days. When the twins were delivered, she went back to Paterson—a three-hour drive, thought Mavis. She could be there before
The Secret Storm,
which she had missed all summer long.
    At a Fill ’n Go gas station, Mavis checked her wallet before she answered the attendant. Three ten-dollar bills were folded behind her driver’s license.
    “Ten,” she said.
    “Gallons or dollars, m’am?”
    “Gallons.”
    In the adjacent lot, Mavis noticed the window of a breakfast diner reflecting coral in the early light.
    “Is that there place open?” she shouted over highway truck roar.
    “Yes, m’am.”
    Tripping occasionally on gravel, she walked toward the diner. Inside, the waitress was eating crab cakes and grits behind the counter. She covered her plate with a cloth and touched the corners of her mouth before wishing Mavis a good morning and taking her order. When Mavis left, carrying a paper cup of coffee and two honey dips in a napkin, she caught the waitress’s broad smile in the Hires Root Beer mirror by the exit. The grin bothered her all the way back to the gas station until, stepping into the car, she saw her canary-yellow feet.
    Away from the pump, parked behind the diner, she put her breakfast on the dashboard while rummaging in the glove compartment. She found an unopened pint of Early Times, another bottle with an inch or so of scotch whiskey, paper napkins, a teething ring, several rubber bands, a pair of dirty socks, a battery-dead flashlight, a tube of lipstick, a Florida map, rolls of breath mints and a few traffic tickets. She dropped the teething ring into her purse, twisted her hair into a sad little ponytail that stuck out from the rubber band like hen feathers, and smeared the stranger’s lipstick on her mouth. Then she sat back and sipped the coffee. Too nervous to ask for milk or sugar, she’d ordered it black and could not force herself to take a third swallow. The stranger’s lipstick smirked sloppily from the cardboard rim.
    The Cadillac drank ten gallons of gasoline every ninety miles. Mavis wondered whether to call her mother or simply arrive. The latter seemed smarter. Frank may have called his mother-in-law by now or might do so any minute. Better if her mother could say truthfully, “I don’t know where she is.” Paterson took five hours, not three, and she had four dollars and seventy-six cents when she saw its sign. The fuel gauge touched E.
    The streets looked narrower than she remembered, and the stores were different. The northern leaves were already starting to turn. Driving underneath them, in the dappled hall they made,