The Red Towel

The yellow wrecker came around the corner of the building backward, beacon turning, beeping at every foot, and stopped a yard from my tailgate.

"Leave the truck alone," I said.

The porter at the controls looked through the glass at me, then at Brent. He was maybe twenty. He did not want this job today.

"You heard me," Brent called. "Back fence."

"She's got more miles on her than your whole lot," I said. "And she's taking me home."

"Then you should've parked it where the help parks." Brent winked at the Pembertons. "Something tells me you know where that is."

Behind him, Rex Pemberton was climbing out of my car. Something red came off the leather with him. He held it up between two fingers, looked at my canvas jacket, and tossed it to me.

A shop towel. Red cotton, washed so many times it had gone soft as flannel.

I caught it before I could think about it. My hands did the rest. Half, then a corner tucked under, then the long edge over, until it sat in my palm as a tight red triangle.

Ivy stared at it. "That's how he leaves them," she said. "One on every seat he finishes. Nobody else folds them that way."

She reached over and turned the corner up. White thread, hand-stitched, a little crooked: CLEM.

Brent plucked it out of my hand. "It's a rag." He dropped it in the wastebasket beside Ivy's desk without looking.

"Clem Haverty still works here?" I asked.

"Thirty-one years," Ivy said. "He mostly does the used lot now. Mr. Harlow moved him out of the new-car bay in the spring."

Thirty-one years. He had been here every single day I stayed away.

The last time I had held one of those towels, I was sixteen and bleeding. It was a December dawn in 1999, on this same lot, in the back of a trade-in van with a dead dome light. I had split my eyebrow on the door latch in the dark. A big man with the first gray in his hair slid the door open, looked at me for a long moment, and pressed a red towel against my face.

He never asked my last name. He asked if I had eaten.

Brent was already walking away, calling instructions to the porters.

Ivy leaned close. "Mr. Treadwell, who is Clem to you?"

I looked at the wastebasket. "That towel," I said, "is the reason I drove six hundred miles."