She Hired My Company to Haul Her Late Father’s $900,000 Car to Arizona in Five Days. Then She Climbed Into My Cab

We left at five the next morning. The roadster was strapped inside the trailer like a crown jewel, insured for nine hundred thousand dollars. My cargo underwriter had made me sign four extra forms.

Audra climbed into my cab with a thermos, a cooler and a stack of chemistry tests to grade.

“You can’t grade tests for twenty-three hundred miles,” I said.

“Watch me.”

She graded through Maryland. She graded through West Virginia. Somewhere in Kentucky, she gave a student named Tyler a D-minus and said, “Sorry, Tyler,” out loud to nobody.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

She looked over at me. And for the first time, she laughed too.

After that, we talked. About her father, who’d been a machinist at the steel mill for thirty-eight years. About her divorce, and mine. About the brother in Denver who wanted to sell everything and split it, and the lawyer handling the probate, who billed by the quarter hour and called her “dear.”

“Dad said that car was the only beautiful thing he ever owned,” she said in Tennessee. “Everything else was useful.”

We stopped in Oklahoma City the third night. I took two rooms at a truck stop motel.

At midnight, I went out to check the trailer. I always check the trailer.

The side door was unlatched.

My heart stopped. Nine hundred thousand dollars. I pulled the flashlight off my belt and swung the beam inside.

Audra was sitting in the driver’s seat of the roadster, in her coat, with both hands on the wheel.

She was crying so hard she couldn’t breathe.

“I don’t want to sell it,” she said. “Colter, I can’t sell it.”