Holly Day
In the garage behind the house my parents rented
was a Ford Model T that the owner brought out only for Fourth of July
when he would put on a suit and a top hat and drive at the front of the parade.
My parents didn’t have a key to the garage, since it was there only for the car,
but since we were so little, my sister and I could pull the double-doors open
just wide enough
to slip inside the garage where the car was.
We didn’t do any damage to anything in the garage,
we weren’t trying to be bad. We didn’t even bother
looking in any of the old trunks and boxes piled up on either side of the garage
Instead, we’d climb into the front seat of the car, the roof a thin membrane,
like a black bat wing spread overhead,
pretend we were driving that beautiful machine out of the garage
and onto the road into a glorious, magical past.
I wasn’t a bad kid, but one day I found the key to the car under the front floorboard
it looked just like a cartoon skeleton key, twice as long as a regular car key
thick and solid like it belonged more to a castle door
than to a car. I slipped it into the ignition
but I didn’t turn it because there was nowhere to go
except to crash into the closed garage door straight ahead. .
It felt good to put that key in, the satisfying clunk of metal against metal.
When Fourth of July came around, the owner of the house came
and got his car out of the garage, unlocked the doors and flung them wide
had to push the car out of the garage because machines don’t like to sit that long.
Once he got it started, he took us for a ride around the block in that noisy old thing
that shuttered and groaned like it was going to fall apart any second
told us most little girls probably never get to sit in a car like this one,
not even once
that this was a truly special car
something we could tell our husbands about someday.