Blog still being down, I’m filling this space with another of my Legacy Writing posts, this one from November 17, 2012, to recall a time when I was in sixth grade and Debby was a junior in high school.
When we moved to Alabama, my father bought an old Ford Falcon to drive to work so my mother wouldn’t be left at home without a car. It looked something like this.
It was painted light blue, and either the original paint was flaking off, or it had been badly repainted. It had bench seats in front and back. The radio played even when the car wasn’t running and without the key being turned at all. Daddy’s drive to work was about ten miles, and Debby and I went to school in the same college town where he worked. The heater would finally start to warm up the car about halfway there on winter mornings, and the car always smelled faintly of gasoline. And cigarettes, because he smoked then.
He’d drop Debby off at the high school. My school was just across the street from the ROTC building. In the afternoons, Debby would walk there from school, and we’d sit in the car and wait for him to get off of work an hour and a half later. Sometimes she had after-school activities, and sometimes I went to my friend Pam’s grandmother’s house, which was just down the street from his building, and Pam and I would watch TV or feed apples to her horse–or someone’s horse–who was pastured nearby.
On the days that Debby and I sat in the car and waited for Daddy, we’d listen to the radio and she’d sneak cigarettes. One day I glanced toward the building and gasped. “Debby! Here comes Daddy!”
She hurriedly stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and slammed it shut. It wasn’t time for him to go home; he was just coming to check on us, he said. He leaned his hands against the outside roof of the car on the driver’s side, where my sister sat, and talked to us for a few minutes. It wasn’t long before I realized that the fire from Debby’s cigarette had relit some of Daddy’s old cigarette butts, and smoke was starting to pour from the ashtray. While she kept him talking, I surreptitiously tried to wave the smoke toward my open window.
Finally Daddy went back inside his building and we almost collapsed from relief that he hadn’t noticed the near-fire that was going by that time in the ashtray.
Many years later, we were sitting around telling stories. Debby mentioned that she used to smoke in his car after school but he never knew it since he was a smoker, too.
“I could see you smoking every day from my office window,” he said. “Of course I knew.”
Ever The Snitch, I said, “Yeah, but you didn’t know about the time she set your ashtray on fire.”
“No,” he agreed. “Why would I have noticed plumes of smoke coming from the dashboard and you waving your arms around in the background?”
THEY ALWAYS SEE EVERYTHING.