All I Have in This World by Michael Parker Page A

allowed to sit unwashed in the sink until supper, which her mother, scrubbing hardened flakes from the bottom of the bowl, would see as emblematic of Maria’s unworthiness.
    â€œLet me call one of the Keplers. They went to school with your daddy. They run a used lot off Presidio Street. Bobby, I believe, is the younger one. He’ll do you a good deal, I bought the Cherokee from him.”
    Maria knew better than to turn down her mother’s offer. This was the way it worked here. If you wanted something, you called someone you went to school with or married the cousin of or worked with at the Dairy Queen in high school. Besides, what did she know about buying a car? She’d never owned one. She’d always taken the bus or walked. Randy loved cars. He drove a Nova. Endless and incomprehensible was the list of modifications he’d made to the stock engine, and the fact that she even knew to say “modifications” or “stock” was shocking to her after so many years. But since she had been back, all sorts of details had shown up from somewhere she feared forever lost. She remembered the hours Randy and his cousins and his friends spent crawling around under cars on oily concrete slabs. She’d head over to his house after school and there he would be, in the drive, cut off to the waist, his head swallowed by the gaping hood. Good God, the hours wasted while Randy talked cars with her father. From her bedroom window she’d see Randy pull into the drive, and her father would be out watering or tinkering under the carport, and Randy would barely have the door open before her father would sweep up on him, and through the open window she’d hear her father say, “Okay, Rand, let’s see what all you did to her last weekend.” Then the pop of the hood latch, the creak the hood made as it rested its weight on the rod that propped it open, and she knew it would be thirty minutes before Randy would ever make it into the house, and most of the time he would not make it, she’d have to go out and stand around while Randy and her dad spoke a language made up entirely of car-part names and the histrionic verbs of sports writers, which they used to describe either the things their cars had done or the things they wanted them to do, along with sound effects that would have made her laugh had she not been so bored.
    Later, alone in the car, she would make fun of him for caring so much about something so inconsequential and he would grin as if this was all he wanted in the world, a woman to stay on his case night and day for the next sixty years. But she did not want that. She did not want to nag, and so why couldn’t he stop doing those things that caused her to nag?
    â€œJust come over a half hour early,” she said to him once. “Like, if we’re supposed to be somewhere at seven, come at six thirty and talk your boring car talk with him until seven. That way we can be on time.”
    Randy said she was cracking him up, telling him when to show up and how long he could talk about the thing he loved besides her.
    â€œBut you love me more, don’t you?”
    â€œMore than my ride?” Randy pretended to give it thirty seconds of thought. “It’s in a different column, a car and a girl.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about, a column?”
    â€œLike at school when they make you classify things in lists. And you have to put up top of the column what the category is.”
    â€œSo you have a column for girls and one for cars?”
    â€œNot
girls, girl. Girl
without an
s.
But yeah,
cars
plural because I like more than one car and I plan on owning way more than this one. Unlike in the girl column.”
    â€œAre you saying you own me?”
    â€œYeah, Maria. I purchased you at Dollar General. I still got the receipt, so maybe you better stop picking at me, trying to trap me into saying something stupid, like I want more than one girl or I own