The garage door was wide open when I came downstairs that Thursday morning, and that single detail stopped me cold in the kitchen doorway. For forty-two years of marriage, Frank never left that door open—not once, not even by accident. He was meticulous about his routines, careful with his possessions, protective of the things he loved.
But Frank had been gone for eight months now, and I was still learning to navigate a world where his habits no longer mattered because he wasn’t here to maintain them. I stood there holding my coffee mug, feeling the warmth seep into my palms while a cold dread spread through my chest. Something was wrong.
I could feel it the way you feel a storm coming before the first drop of rain falls—a pressure in the air, a shift in the atmosphere that announces change whether you’re ready for it or not. I set the mug down on the counter and walked toward the open garage, my slippers scuffing against the concrete driveway. The spring morning was beautiful—warm breeze, birds singing, the kind of day Frank would have loved.
He’d have been out here at dawn, humming along to Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson while he wiped down the chrome on his car, that vintage beauty he’d spent twenty years restoring from a rusted shell into something magnificent. But when I reached the garage and looked inside, my heart dropped into my stomach like a stone into dark water. The space where his car had lived for two decades was empty.
Completely, devastatingly empty. Gone. His car was gone.
I stood there staring at the oil-stained patch of concrete where it had rested, feeling like the ground was tilting beneath me. I could still see it so clearly in my mind—the deep burgundy paint he’d applied himself, coat after painstaking coat, the chrome details that gleamed like mirrors, the leather interior he’d conditioned and protected with the same care some people give to fine art. The smell of motor oil and that orange-scented hand soap he always used still seemed to linger in the air, a ghost of presence in a space now defined by absence.
His tools still hung on the pegboard wall, each one outlined in black marker so he’d know exactly where it belonged—wrenches arranged by size, screwdrivers sorted by type, everything in perfect order. Everything except the car. Everything except the thing that had mattered most.
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