Ten dollar Chevy

I lost my tape to a shuttle driver in Nashville and never got it back. Then there was that journal full of grandfather poems abandoned in a London taxi. But none of this comes close to the time Martha left her boyfriend waiting in a phone booth on the freeway outside Eureka as she sped away or should I say lurched in that ten dollar Chevy with no windshield and only second and third gears. She never knew how vital it could be to have reverse in the palm of your hand. No reverse gear. So she kept going all the way to the Okanagan Valley and blended in with the seasonal tribe of apple pickers. Left that Chevy in a ditch outside Spokane and hitched into the next stage of life wondering if George had ever figured out she wasn't going to make it back. Maybe he was still there smelling the salt sea air talking lobster pots and 19th century engravings with the local booksellers. Or maybe someone else turned up, someone with a windshield and reverse, to give George a warm bed and a BLT at midnight. Maybe George metamorphosed right there in that northern Californian phone booth like Superman flowering into an indestructible arrangement of blues and reds with flashes of yellow. Maybe a lightning bolt took George out. That sort of thing happens, thought Martha, as she kept moving forward, reaching for another apple and another, not caring when or how things get ripe, only filling the boxes, filling her pockets, filling her heart without remorse, filling her life with the Okanagan autumn before all the leaves would most certainly fall after the first frost.