once seemed like a hardship to either of them. It had just been how they were made, the two of them, like a pair of hands where one held the jar and the other turned the lid.
Then the hand that turned the lid had started to go.
So in August, in the heat, he had taken her out to the gravel lot behind Calvary Free Will Baptist on a Tuesday evening, in Lyda Spurlock's Buick because their own truck was a 1996 Chevy S-10 with a five-speed that had been stubborn even when it was young. And Imogene had sat behind the wheel with both hands clenched at the top of it and her purse on her lap, because she would not put it down, and she had said, "Which one's the gas?"
"The skinny one."
"They're both skinny."
"The right one, Immy."
She had found the right one. She had found it so hard that the Buick shot across the gravel like a flushed quail, and she had screamed and stood on the brake, and they had sat there afterward in a cloud of white dust, both of them breathing like they had run up a hill, and then, without warning, she had begun to laugh. She had laughed until she had to take her glasses off. He had laughed with her. A man from the church had come out the back door to see who was being murdered and had found two old people in a borrowed Buick laughing so hard they could not speak.
That was August. In September she had driven to the Kroger with him in the passenger seat calling out the turns. In early October she had failed her road test, on the parallel parking, and come home and gone straight to bed at four in the afternoon without supper. The Thursday just past she had passed it. She had come out of the testing lot with the examiner, a heavy, gentle man with a clipboard, and the examiner had shaken her hand, and Imogene had walked to where Arvel was standing by the building and stopped in front of him and said, in a voice he had not heard her use since they were young, "Well, Mr. Johnson. Where would you like to go?"
He had said, "Anywhere you're driving." And meant it.
The trouble was what she would be driving. Lyda needed her Buick back; she had been more than kind, and her son in Evansville had started to make noises about insurance. The S-10 was out of the question. It had a clutch like a