The Penny Under the Mat

[Side Story — The Valiant's First Life]

Arthur Lindqvist drove with two fingers on the wheel.

Not from carelessness — Arthur was, by nature and profession, a careful man. He had spent thirty-one years as a claims adjuster for a regional insurance company and had developed a deep, professional intimacy with the thousand ways that inattention destroyed things. He knew what happened to people who drove carelessly. He had the paperwork.

No, Arthur drove with two fingers on the wheel because the other hand was always out the window.

His wife Meredith called it his "antenna." She said it like she was teasing, but she wasn't, quite. Arthur genuinely believed that you could feel the quality of a day through an open palm — the way temperature dropped near a creek before you could see it, the way the air thickened differently before rain than before a cold front, the subtle atmospheric pressure of a town that had something going on versus a town where nothing ever would. He had grown up in the flatlands of eastern Kansas where the sky was enormous and the weather made its intentions known thirty miles out, and he had never lost the habit of reading the air.

The Valiant was the right car for this. It had windows that went all the way down without complaint, a heater that worked in the cold months and a ventilation system that, in the warm ones, could be coaxed into a steady cross-breeze if you angled the vents correctly and kept the rear windows cracked about an inch and a half. Arthur had measured this. He knew the precise geometry of comfortable air.

He bought the car in 1968 from a dealership in Wichita, paying full price without haggling because he thought haggling was embarrassing for everyone involved. The salesman seemed surprised by this. Arthur had driven home at a measured forty-eight miles per hour with both windows down, his right hand resting on the sill, feeling the late afternoon air come off the wheat fields in long, warm pulses.

That was a good day. He remembered it specifically.

The penny came from his daughter.

Clara was seven when she pressed it into his palm one Saturday morning, solemnly, with both hands around his one, the way children transfer important objects. It was a 1959 Lincoln cent, which she had found in the gravel of the school parking lot and kept in her coat pocket for two weeks before deciding it had found its proper owner.

"It's for the car," she said. "For luck."

Arthur asked why the car needed luck.

Clara considered this seriously. "Everything needs luck," she said. "Even things that seem fine."

He had placed it under the driver's side floor mat that afternoon, pressing it flat with his thumb. He checked it occasionally over the years — not superstitiously, he told himself, just to make sure it was still there. It always was. The mat wore a small circular impression around it, permanent as a scar.

Arthur drove the Valiant for eleven years.

In that time, the car absorbed a particular kind of life. Saturday drives to nowhere specific. Meredith's grocery bags rustling in the back seat. The summer Clara turned fifteen and sat in the passenger seat for the first time with her learner's permit, gripping the door handle with white knuckles every time Arthur demonstrated a lane change. He drove her to her first day of college in it, the trunk packed so tightly he had to sit on the lid to latch it. On the way home he had driven with both hands on the wheel, which was unusual for him, and hadn't put his window down at all.

The Valiant also carried quieter things. The drive home from the hospital the night his mother died. The particular silence of that trip, the way the road had looked the same as always and this had seemed briefly monstrous to him. He had pulled over once, into a gas station that was closed, and sat with the engine running for about twelve minutes before he could continue.

These things don't leave a car. Not really. They settle into the upholstery and the wheel and the particular creak the driver's door makes when it opens. A car driven long and honestly by one person becomes, in some minor and unverifiable way, a record of them.

Meredith died in March of 1979.

It was quick, which the doctors said was a mercy, and Arthur understood intellectually that they were right. It didn't feel like a mercy. It felt like a sentence that had ended in the middle and left him rereading it, trying to locate the rest.

He drove less after that. The errands still happened — the grocery store, the hardware store, the occasional trip to see Clara and her husband two towns over — but the purposeless drives stopped. Without Meredith in the passenger seat occasionally reading aloud from whatever she was working through, or simply sitting in comfortable silence with her shoes off and her feet on the dash, the car felt too large for its purpose.

He kept the penny under the mat. He didn't check it as often.

He died nine months later, which Clara said later she felt she should have seen coming, because her father was not the kind of man who knew how to want things for himself. He had structured his wanting entirely around other people, which was either a great love or a kind of slow disappearance, and perhaps it was both.

Clara sold the Valiant to a woman she didn't know who had appeared at the estate sale with cash and a businesslike manner that Clara, still numb from two losses in less than a year, had found obscurely comforting. Six hundred dollars. The woman didn't try it on, didn't ask about the mileage, didn't look under the hood. She looked at the wheel-well space on the interior, nodded once, and counted out the bills.

Clara watched the car back out of the driveway from the kitchen window.

She forgot to mention the penny.

The woman who bought it was named Jillian Messan.

She drove it directly to a storage unit she had rented under a different name, where she spent four hours removing the rear seat cushion, lining the interior with a copper mesh she had sourced from a laboratory supplier, and installing a device behind the dashboard that Clara's father would not have recognized and that Arthur, had he known its purpose, would have found deeply troubling.

Jillian was not a careful driver. She drove fast and with full attention, both hands on the wheel, eyes moving in a specific pattern — mirrors, road, mirrors — like someone who had calculated the geometry of control and was executing it. She did not put her hand out the window.

She drove the Valiant for many years.

She did not find the penny for almost six months. When she did — crouching to check a coupling under the driver's seat, her fingers finding the small hard disc beneath the mat — she held it for a moment, looking at it. 1959. She put it in her jacket pocket. She never mentioned it in her journals.

When Echo drives the Valiant now, she does things she has no memory of learning.

She keeps the driver's window cracked at a precise angle — not all the way down, not halfway, but a specific notch that produces a steady cross-breeze without buffeting. On long stretches of empty road, her right hand sometimes drifts from the wheel toward the window before she notices and brings it back. She has pulled over twice for no reason she could name — once at a closed gas station, once at the edge of a wheat field where the air coming off the crops had a quality she couldn't describe — and sat with the engine running for a few minutes before continuing.

She assumes these are Mata Hari's habits. Mata Hari, who had made a life of reading rooms, reading people, reading the subtle atmospheric pressure of a situation before it announced itself.

This is a reasonable assumption.

The penny is in the glove compartment now. Echo found it wedged in a seam of the jacket Jillian had left in the trunk — 1959, Lincoln cent, the face of it worn smooth from handling. She doesn't know where it came from. She keeps it anyway. She checks it occasionally, not superstitiously, just to make sure it's still there.

Clara Lindqvist, two states away and twenty years older, sometimes sees a 1966 Valiant on the road and feels something she can't account for. She doesn't follow it. She just watches until it turns or disappears, and then she goes on with her day.

Everything needs luck, she had told her father.

Even things that seem fine.