Your father says you can take his car for the errand if you want. You want. He hands you the keys without stopping what he is doing with the sander in the garage. The keys have a plastic fob on them that says TRI-R AUTO SERVICE — 303-DIAL-CAR.
The car is an eleven-year-old Subaru Outback in a color that used to be silver and is now more of a specific Colorado metallic-dust color that happens to all silver cars after eight years in the Front Range sun. The driver's seat is set to your father's height, which is three inches taller than yours; you adjust it and the lumbar-support clicks into a position you do not know how to undo. The odometer reads 168,414. The gas-tank needle is at a hair above quarter.
You pull out of the driveway.
You learn several things on the two-and-a-half miles from the house to the King Soopers at First and Steele. Your father keeps his side-view-mirrors angled too wide for your taste and you do not re-angle them. The cup-holder is still wet from a coffee spill some week before this one. The radio is on a local jazz station — 89.3 FM KUVO — and a piano trio is playing something that is ending as you pull in, and the DJ says that was Keith Jarrett at the Köln Concert from nineteen seventy-five, and then the DJ says nothing for a beat, and you do not turn the station.
A billboard at the corner of University and First says GOD IS STILL HERE — CHRISTMAS AT FIRST BAPTIST. A second billboard down the block says FOR LEASE / 4,200 SQ FT / 303 WHEN YOU ARE. You read both without meaning to.
King Soopers is the size of a warehouse. You have been in King Soopers once before, in high school, when your father took you the summer you visited at sixteen. The aisle markers are numbered one through twenty-two, and you do not remember which aisle has what. You find the flour by going to baking supplies via the end-cap-sign method. The flour is on the third shelf from the bottom. Gold Medal. Five-pound. Three-forty-nine.
You put it in the cart. You put a small jar of cabbage-roll filling in the cart that is not what you will use but you consider it. You take it back out. You go to the refrigerated section and you pick up a pound of ground pork for four-ninety-nine, and an onion for seventy-three cents, and a clear-plastic box of sour cream for two-nineteen. You remember salt is already in the house.
At the end of the cabbage aisle a woman about your age stops a man who is her father — you can tell by the shape of the pause — and points at a bag of potatoes and says, these ones are cheaper but they're for baking, those ones are for boiling, and the father says, OK, and puts the potatoes the woman picked in the cart. The woman looks past you without seeing you. The man nods at you without seeing you. You nod at both of them anyway.
The cashier is a young woman with a name tag that says BRIANA and dark hair pulled up in a way that says she has been on her shift since before the lunch-rush. She scans your five items.
Members card?
No.
Phone number?
No thanks.
That's fine.
The subtotal is twelve-sixty, with tax thirteen-forty-one. You tap your card. The receipt prints. Briana folds it into quarters in the specific way cashiers fold receipts when they've been trained. She hands it to you and it has the corners folded in.
Have a good Saturday.
You too.
You take the bags and go.
Your father's car is in the row you left it. The row has gained an F-150 pickup since you parked. The pickup has a Colorado plate that begins with the letter M, which is the letter you sometimes remember Colorado plates to begin with. In the bed, a load of split pine the same size as the pieces stacked against the mudroom wall at your father's house — reasonable; half the houses in this zip code heat with wood in November and people buy split pine from the same small number of suppliers.
You load the groceries into the back seat.
You sit in the driver's seat for a moment without starting the engine. The seat is still set to your father's lumbar. The dashboard has an orange warning-light that comes on when the fuel dips below an eighth — you glance; it is not on yet, but it will be by Tuesday. The jazz station is still paused between tracks.
You start the engine. You pull out of the King Soopers lot and turn east on First. The mountains to your right.
You drive home.