I found a GPS tracker under my Camry on a Tuesday morning. By lunchtime, I’d shipped it to a friend in Toronto. That evening, a man I didn’t know called and said, “Please tell me you still have it.”
“It’s on its way to Canada,” I said. “How do you know about it?”
“Your friend called me.” He took a breath. “So did your son.”
I sat down at the kitchen table. Ryan had been over on Saturday to put air in my tires. I’d made him a sandwich while he did it.
“What did my son want?”
“To know why it stopped reporting.”
I was fifty-eight, divorced, and living by myself outside Columbus, Ohio. Ryan was thirty-one and worked as an independent insurance adjuster. For most of the year after his mother and I split up, he’d called on Sundays and stopped by when there was something too heavy for me to lift by myself. Lately he’d been coming around more often. He’d bring a rotisserie chicken or stay long enough to watch the end of a Buckeyes game. I’d started buying the mustard he liked again.
That Saturday, he’d come in through the side door and set his little air compressor on the kitchen floor.
“Your rear tire looks low,” he said. “Give me your keys. I’ll pull it forward where I can get around it.”
I tossed him the keys and got out the bread. When he came back in, there was gravel stuck to one knee of his jeans. We ate standing up at the counter, the way we used to when he was a teenager and had somewhere better to be.
“You still thinking about driving over to Aunt Ellen’s?” he asked.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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