He got up off the bench. It took him two tries; the first time he got halfway and sat back down, and he said something under his breath that she pretended not to hear, and the second time he made it. He walked to the open driver's door and stood looking in. Then he looked at her.
"Can I sit in it?"
She thought about it. She thought about it honestly, because it was a real question, and because she was a woman alone at a gas station at dusk with a man who forty minutes ago had laughed at her and said what he had said, and because it was her father's seat. She thought about what her father would have said. Then she did not need to think about that, because she knew.
"Yes," she said. "Leave the door open."
He lowered himself into the driver's seat the way big men lower themselves into old cars, one leg first and then a sort of controlled fall, and the seat springs creaked under him. He sat with his hands on his thighs. He did not touch the wheel. He looked at the dash, the round gauges and the wood strip and the Becker radio with its chrome knobs, the clock, the medal. He looked at the headliner, which her father had redone in a fabric he had driven to Kansas City for. He put a hand flat on the vinyl of the passenger seat beside him and rubbed it, slowly, back and forth.
"These aren't the seats," he said.
"No. The thieves took the seats. He found these in Belleville. Out of a car in a barn."
"They're the right color."
"He looked for eleven months."
He nodded. He took his hand off the seat. "Can I—" He gestured at the ignition. The key was in her hand; she had taken it out of the door. She held it a moment, looking at it, the black plastic head with the star pressed into it, and then she handed it to him through the open door.
He put it in. He turned it to the second position. The orange light came on in the dash, the little coil.