The license plate on the garage wall
once belonged to a farmer named Harold
who suffered from hemorrhoids and didn’t love his wife.
Every morning, early, he drove his truck,
considering the road ahead and the color of the sky,
past the store that had been the Five and Dime and then the Sugar
Bowl Ice Cream Parlor.
She’d ordered a banana split,
looking a thousand miles away as she ate,
and Harold longed to go a thousand miles away with her
but she complained of brain freeze so he took her home,
haunted for the rest of his life
by the possibility that he’d bored her.
Then Marge came along.
Julie of the distant eyes had moved away
and that boat had sailed
anyway.
Every night he slept with Marge
beneath a quilt that made him sweat:
roses and polka-dots,
peonies and pinstripes.
When he tossed it aside, itchy and smothered,
Marge would tenderly cover him again,
and Harold would close his eyes
as she laid him to rest.
Their kids grew up;
Ray ran a tattoo parlor. He married a girl
named Darlene Marge always said wasn’t right in the head.
Tina started drinking after her husband
left her for a woman named
Dawn who wrote bad poetry.
One night serving up pork chops
in the bile green kitchen, Marge said,
remember Julie Warnick?
The mushroom soup was congealing around the chop on the yellow plate
as Harold recalled the swoop of Julie’s pale hair
before she secured it behind her ears
and took up her spoon.
A little, he said.
She died; it was cancer apparently.
He did not taste the pork chops. But then Marge
had prepared this dish each Wednesday night
for forty-three years;
it has been decades since he tasted pork chops.
After he died (heart congestion)
Harold’s pickup sat in the garage for fifteen years.
Marge clung hard to her routine
of church and get-togethers with the girls
and a crochet club started up at the community center,
but then she had a fall
and the routine that glued her minutes and hours and days together
melted away and she remembered
the boredom she’d tried so hard not to see
on Harold’s face
every day of their marriage.
Ray and Tina visited her in the nursing home
and she smiled and nodded at the chocolates and crossword puzzles
but it was so late
and she needed to say the words in her head.
Of course Daddy loved you,
Tina looked out across the parking lot, bored and resentful,
fifty-five and hoping a man named Greg
who collected Meerschaum pipes
would marry her.
When their Mom died Ray and Tina
held an estate sale to get rid of all the household items
accumulated over a span of almost fifty years,
then put the house on the market.
Ray sold his dad’s old pickup.
Years later the license plate ended up in a cardboard box
In the back of an antique store named Years Gone By
that sold collector’s items.
Tina had drunk herself to death by this time
but Ray and Darlene were welcoming grandchild number six.
A man who lived alone
bought the license plate that was once fixed to
Harold’s pickup as he drove to the farm wondering
What would have happened if he’d called her after
the brain freeze incident?
Of course the man who bought the
license plate knew none of this.
He took it home and hung it on his garage wall.
Stepped back.
Carefully straightened it.
It looked really cool.
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