"It's a Christian saint, Babo."
"I know what it is." He had turned it over. "Your grandmother had a neighbor in Doboj, a Croat, Mrs. Jurić, she had one of these over her door. When the shelling started, your grandmother hid in Mrs. Jurić's cellar for three days, under this man with the baby on his shoulder. Nobody asked anybody what they prayed to." He had put the medal back down on the bench, face up, and pushed it a little toward her with one finger. "We keep it for them. Maybe someday they come for it."
He had written a letter. She knew that too. He had written to the insurance company whose name was on the salvage certificate, in his careful American English that he had learned from night classes and from the radio, explaining that he had purchased vehicle such-and-such and had found in it an item of personal and religious value belonging to the prior owner, and that he would like to return it, and could they please forward this letter or provide an address. He had shown it to her to check the spelling. The insurance company had written back four months later and said that it was unable to release personal information about prior policyholders but would forward his correspondence to the last address on file. After that nothing had come. Her father had waited a year, and then two, and then he had stopped saying maybe someday they come for it and started saying it as a joke, when he was polishing the chrome on a Saturday: maybe today they come. Maybe today, Selma. Look, I clean it for them.
The glow plug light went out. She turned the key the rest of the way, and the engine caught on the second turn the way it always did, with a rattling shudder that settled after a moment into the loose steady knock of the five cylinders. She let it idle and listened. It sounded good. It always sounded good. She sometimes thought that she drove it on Fridays less to keep the engine alive than to hear that it was still alive, the way her mother still called her every night at nine just to hear her say, I'm here, Mama, everything's fine.
She checked the fuel gauge. Just above the red. She would have to stop.
She went out the back gate and down the alley to Morgan Ford and north to Gravois, and the car settled into itself the way it always did after the first mile, the knock of the engine smoothing as the oil came up to temperature, the big thin wheel going light in her hands. She drove it the way her father had taught her to drive it, which was gently, as if it were older than she was, which it nearly was. Gravois at five o'clock on a Friday in October was thick and slow. The light had gone the color of honey and lay along the storefronts on the north side of the street, the Bosnian bakery with the three-tiered wedding cakes in the window, the Vietnamese nail salon, the bar with no windows at all. At the corner by the old windmill restaurant, where her parents had taken her to celebrate her high school graduation because it was the fanciest place they could think of within walking distance, a boy of fifteen or so on a bicycle looked over at the car at the light and gave her a thumbs-up. She gave him one back. Old men at gas stations would sometimes come over and tell her about the one their uncle had, the one that ran four hundred thousand miles, and she would let them talk, because her father would have.
The QuikTrip was a few blocks on, on the south side of the street. She swung in and pulled up to the diesel pump on the far end, the one with the green handle, where the big pickup trucks went, and turned off the engine and sat a moment while it ticked.
It was when she got out to fuel that she noticed the police car.
It had come in behind her. She had not seen it on Gravois, or she had seen it and not registered it, which was the same thing; you did not drive in this city for twenty-eight years in a headscarf without learning to see police cars the way you saw weather, as a condition of the road, something you adjusted for without looking at it directly. It was one of the city's newer SUVs, white with the blue stripe and the gold star on the door, and it had not pulled up to a pump. It had pulled into one of the parking spaces along the front of the store, nose out, facing the pumps, with its engine running, and it sat there.
She put her card in the reader. She put in her zip code. She lifted the green handle and opened the fuel door and unscrewed the cap and set it on the trunk lid and put the nozzle in and squeezed. The pump began to count. It counted slowly; the old car's filler neck would not take the nozzle at full speed without spitting back, so you had to hold the trigger halfway and wait, and she stood with her hip against the rear fender and waited, and did not look at the police car, and looked at it.
There was one person in it. The driver. A big shape behind the windshield, a pale face, the glow of the laptop screen mounted on the console turned toward him. He was typing. He would type and then stop and look up through the windshield at her car and then look back down and type some more.