Stories the old cars still tell.

The summer my father brought home the Mustang, I was eight years old and the heat sat on Birmingham like a thumb. He pulled it into the carport on a Tuesday evening, and I remember the tick of the engine cooling while we all stood in the driveway not saying anything. My mother pressed her lips together. My brother counted the louvers on the rear quarter panel. I just looked at the fastback roofline — that long, descending slope — and thought it looked like something that wanted to leave.

He never explained the color — Nightmist Blue, the kind of deep blue that looks black until the sun insists — but I understood later that he had chosen it the way a man chooses something he believes he doesn't deserve.

That car smelled of vinyl and something faintly chemical, a factory smell that never fully left it. On hot afternoons the interior would build to a temperature that was almost punishing, and the steering wheel was too hot to hold with bare hands. We drove to Tuscaloosa once, my father and I, and he let me rest my arm out the window while the wind took my elbow and held it. The 390 cubic-inch engine moved us down the highway with a sound that was less a roar than a low, constant argument with the road.

He kept that car eleven years. Waxed it Saturday mornings in the driveway with a chamois cloth, working in circles. He never entered it in any show, never invited anyone to admire it. It was not that kind of car to him.

When I was nineteen he sold it to a man from Anniston who restored old Fords. My father shook the man’s hand in the driveway and watched him drive away, and then went inside without a word. I think he had decided, finally, that he did deserve it — and that realizing so had made it possible to let go.

I have never owned a Mustang. But I still notice them when they pass, that roofline, and I still think: something that wanted to leave. Something that waited, instead.

Let me be honest about the Bel Air: it was too much car. This was the general condition of American automotive design in 1957, and the Bel Air was its most cheerful example. I bought mine secondhand from a pharmacist in Glendale who had kept it so clean you could have performed minor surgery on the hood. I was twenty-four. I had recently discovered that advertising paid reasonably well and that Pasadena on a Sunday morning was the finest place on earth.

The fins were, objectively speaking, absurd — two chrome-tipped blades jutting from the rear like the ambitions of a civilization that had not yet encountered consequence. I loved them unreservedly. I loved the two-tone paint, Onyx Black over India Ivory, and I loved the way the chrome trim caught the light on Colorado Boulevard at eight in the morning when the street was still empty and the air smelled of jacaranda and someone’s coffee.

The V8 was not subtle. Nothing about that car was subtle. When you started it on a cold morning the whole thing shuddered once, like a large animal shaking off sleep, and then settled into an idle that you felt in your back teeth. People talk about cars as though restraint were a virtue. The Bel Air held no such opinion.

I drove a girl named Frances to Santa Barbara in it that autumn. She wore a yellow scarf and held it against the wind with both hands the whole way up the coast highway. I do not know what became of Frances. I know exactly what became of the car: I sold it in 1963 to pay for a furniture deposit, a decision I have reconsidered perhaps once a week for the past thirty-four years.

What I miss is not the spectacle of it — though the spectacle was considerable — but the specific quality of light on those Sunday mornings, the way the world looked navigable from behind that wide steering wheel, the particular confidence of driving something that had made up its mind completely about what it was.

The pharmacist had been right to keep it clean. Some things deserve that kind of attention.

I paid three hundred and forty dollars for it from a geology student at Northern Arizona University who was moving to Portland and claimed, unconvincingly, that it ran fine. It ran. Fine is a word I would use loosely.

The 1967 had the air-cooled flat-four in the rear, which meant the engine noise lived directly behind your head like a very committed small appliance. In winter, which in Flagstaff is most of the year, the heater — such as it was — pulled warmth off the engine through a set of ducts that I came to think of as a suggestion rather than a system. I wore a coat. I wore two coats. The car was not embarrassed about this.

It was Zenith Blue, a color that sounded more distinguished than it looked, which was a medium dusty blue that faded toward gray in strong sun. The chrome on the bumpers had gone soft in places. The previous owner had replaced the shift knob with a billiard ball, and I never changed it because it turned out an eight-ball is an excellent shift knob.

What I did not expect was how the car made strangers talk to me. Gas stations, parking lots, the long diagonal space outside the grocery store — people approached it the way people approach dogs, with an opener already ready. An older man in Winslow once spent twenty minutes telling me about a Beetle his sister had driven across New Mexico in 1962, and he was laughing by the end of it, and so was I, and we had never met before and never met again.

I taught fourth grade. I drove forty minutes each way on a road that had opinions about itself in March. The Beetle never complained in any language I recognized as complaint — it just made its sounds, used its fuel sparingly, and arrived. I began to feel, not gratitude exactly, but something in that neighborhood. The acknowledgment that a thing is doing its job without requiring your sympathy.

I sold it after seven years to a young woman who needed transportation and said she'd always wanted one. I showed her how to check the oil, where the jack lived up front, which of its sounds were conversation and which were complaint. She nodded seriously. Driving away from my house she gave a small wave without looking back, already committed to the next thing, and I thought: that's right. That's exactly right.