My Father Changed Cars Every Few Years, But My Mother Always Drove The Same Headache

My father changed cars every few years, as if aging in reverse through steel and chrome. Rambler. Dart. Topaz. The Rambler smelled faintly of gasoline and old raincoats; in winter, the windows fogged so quickly I could draw shapes on them with my fingertip. The Dart’s doors shut with a hollow, decisive thud, and its vinyl seats burned the backs of my legs in summer. The Topaz had a radio that hissed before finding the station, and my father would keep turning the dial until a song came in clean, as if coaxing it out of hiding.

In each of them I sat in the back, knees pulled up or legs sprawled, watching him command the road, feeling that each car had its own weather, its own small country we inhabited together until the day it was sold. His cars were kingdoms—polished, orderly, with rules that were never spoken but always understood. You didn’t leave fingerprints on the windows. You didn’t slam the doors. You sat upright, the seatbelt snug across your chest, while he navigated as if each turn belonged to a carefully memorized map.

My mother’s VW was the opposite: a democracy of scuffed upholstery and crumbs on the floor, the glove compartment full of receipts and loose change. It was the only place where I was allowed to rest my hand on the wheel, to feel the tremor of the road through the thin rim. With her, there was no ceremony—only the quiet acknowledgment that I could be trusted, that I might one day belong in the driver’s seat. That freedom was modest, but it was ours, a kind of intimacy I didn’t yet have the words for.

He was a good man. That’s the sentence I begin with when people ask. Loving. Present. The kind who took us to picnics and never raised his voice. But I remember the time he chased my mother up the stairs, sobbing. The light in the hallway was thin, late afternoon; dust floated in the air like slow-moving ash. His footsteps on the stairs were heavy, uneven, as if each one might break the wood. “I know you’ll never love me again,” he said, and the sound of it was worse than shouting—raw, almost childlike.

I was at the bottom, frozen, my hands gripping the banister. What could make him say such a thing? I felt the terror of what might follow—an image of him collapsing or disappearing altogether—but also, immediately, an ache for him. He was my father, undone before my eyes, stripped of whatever made him steady. My mother didn’t answer. She kept climbing until she vanished into the bedroom, her back straight, her hand on the rail.

The house was full of echoes then: the creak of a step, the muffled sound of a door closing, his breath catching somewhere beyond sight. I stayed there, rooted, my heart pounding with the knowledge that I had just seen something permanent, something I wasn’t supposed to see, and that no one would explain.

My mother never left him. Instead, she reminded him—through silences, through sideways glances, through headaches that lasted entire summers. I’d find her sitting on her bed in the afternoon, one hand on her temple, saying she needed to lie down. No one ever told me what had happened, but it hovered, like humidity. It made the air unbreathable.

Once, they went away together—just the two of them—and sent each of us a postcard. Mine showed a waterfall in Michoacán, the water caught mid-fall, white and endless. I was four. I don’t remember the trip, only the card, my name written in my mother’s careful hand. It was the first thing I can recall that was addressed only to me, and for a moment I felt like someone worth being spoken to directly, someone visible. I carried it around the house until the corners bent, until the image of the cascade became, in my mind, what vacations were supposed to look like: something watery and distant.

Years later, my mother visited me at my office. Only once. She sat across from my desk like a stranger, her coat still buttoned, looking around at the books and diplomas as if she were reading a language she didn’t speak. “We ran into her. At the bank.” Her voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it. She meant the woman from before. My father, already elderly, had seen her in line.

“Do you think he still—?” she asked, but didn’t finish. The pause between words felt long enough for her to reconsider, to swallow the question whole. I told her no. That he’d forgotten. That it was nothing.

She looked past me then, toward the window, as if the answer might be written somewhere outside. “He didn’t say her name,” she added after a moment, “but I knew.” Her hands, resting in her lap, were folded tightly, the knuckles pale. She wanted reassurance, yes, but more than that, she wanted witness: someone to stand beside her in that narrow space between suspicion and memory, where the air felt both cold and used up.

The day of my wedding, she didn’t hand me the letter directly. I found it on my desk in the room where I was getting dressed, my name written on the envelope in her careful hand—a second time she had spoken to me alone, as she once had with the waterfall in Michoacán. Seeing it there, apart from the bustle of the day, gave me the same small jolt I’d felt as a boy: the surprise of being addressed in particular, of being seen.

“You’ve always been the quiet one,” she wrote. “The one I could talk to. That space still exists in me. It always will.”

She died first. A quiet death, in keeping with her temperament. For weeks afterward, he wandered the house like a man adrift, unsure where to place himself without her there.

“It’s all so strange,” he murmured one evening, voice barely more than a whisper. “I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

He followed a month later. I think he just let go. I think he believed she was still upstairs, waiting.

Now, when I see a woman from behind—her coat drawn tight, hair falling just so—I feel that same knot: a child’s ache, the sadness of someone leaving a room again and again. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, a shadow lingers a moment too long, folding quietly into that familiar curve—reluctant, like a presence that doesn’t quite belong anywhere else.

Dad was a good man. But love, in our house, was a kind of ghost. And ghosts, as I’ve learned, rarely leave.