Rust (Matt Shorts, v.3)

Matt called me at work. “Well, you’re an uncle,” he said. I drove up to the hospital in San Francisco when work got out, working my way through Internet-boom rush-hour traffic. Much later, the car I drove that night would be towed by the city from the front of Matt’s house, after we had tried and failed to fix the fuel pump (we got it to start but not run) and then left it for dead in plain view. We didn’t put it in neutral and let it glide down the hill into the Pacific because growing up in Wassaic instilled us with the belief that broken-down cars, prominently displayed and given time, sublimate to their highest and best use. Towing laws are looser back home, and besides, Saabs don’t die so much as rest. Matt attributed the car's breakdown and subsequent towing to the fact that I had just installed a new radio. He believed in a weird car karma, like the time when I arrived late for a dinner in San Francisco with him and his in-laws, and he greeted me at the door, relief plain on his face, saying “I was thinking you had maybe gotten into an accident because you had washed your car.”