How To Steal a Car by Pete Hautman

grandmother would’ve wanted you to have it.”
    I was holding the picture in my lap.
    “What about you? Do you want me to scan it for you?”
    “I have lots of other pictures,” he said.
    “When was this one taken?” I asked.
    “Nineteen sixty-seven.”
    “I know, but what month?”
    “Um, we were in L.A., so I guess it must have been summer. Maybe July? I think by August we were back in the Bay Area.”
    “Was Grandma pregnant then? When you took the picture?”
    It took him a few seconds to answer.
    “I swear, the world went to hell the day we taught you kids to read a calendar.” He paused for a breath or two, then continued. “My guess is, it was right around that time. But we didn’t know it until later, of course. We were staying with this band up in San Francisco and she realized she was a month late.”
    “So you got married?”
    “Well, we waited a few months.”
    “And lived happily ever after.”
    “Yep. Why? You aren’t pregnant, are you?”
    “Grandpa! No!” I felt my cheeks get hot.
    “Good. You stay that way.”
    Desperate for a change of subject, I said, “The Volkswagen in the photo—what color is it?”
    “You’re the one looking at the photo, kiddo.”
    “I’m color-blind,” I reminded him. Or maybe he never knew.
    “Oh! Well, as I recall, it was faded-out red, with a yellow hood. At least that’s what Kate told me. I’m color-blind too, you know.”
    “Was it yours or Grandma’s?”
    He cleared his throat and chuckled. “Kate had the VW when I met her, but it belonged to this other guy she’d been with…” He trailed off the way adults do when they catch themselves talking to a kid like an adult.
    I said, “Like, her boyfriend before you?”
    “Something like that.” He chuckled again. “Crazy times. They’d split up just before I met her, and I guess—well, you knew your grandmother. She was feisty.”
    I remembered her mostly as whiny. But I didn’t say that.
    “I didn’t find out until later that she’d just gone and taken the guy’s car when they broke up. I didn’t know about it until he caught up with us in Santa Rosa and took it back.”
    “Grandma was a car thief?”
    “Just that one time,” he said.
Most people think of car thieves as squinty-eyed young guys with tattoos and grease under their fingernails, but you never know who will steal a car.
    The fact that auto thievery might be as genetic as color blindness was both disturbing and reassuring. I couldn’t resist asking my dad that night at dinner if he’d ever stolen a car.
    He almost dropped his fork. “Have I ever what?” he said.
    “You know, when you were young. During those wild years you never talk about.”
    My mother stifled a laugh with her napkin.
    “I had no wild years,” said my dad.
    I looked at my mom, who shrugged and said, “It’s true.”
    “I talked to Grandpa John this afternoon—he sent me that picture? Of Grandma standing in front of a VW?”
    My dad nodded. “The one he kept on his desk.”
    “Did you know she was pregnant then?”
    He blinked. “I guess I never thought about it, but I suppose she was.”
    “So Grandma and Grandpa had this wild hippie free-love thing going on, and you never got in trouble the whole time you were growing up?”
    “Of course I got in trouble. But I certainly never stole a car!”
    “Grandma did.”
    “She did?” My mom had this quizzical smile. “Kate stole a car?”
    “Just one,” I said. “That Volkswagen.”
    My mom looked at my dad. “This is so much more interesting than talking about your rapist again, isn’t it, dear?”
    In our house my dad was supposedly in charge. He earned most of the money and he was the biggest and hairiest, but in some ways my mother was even more in charge, like a farmer poking an ox with a stick to keep him headed in the right direction. Some days she poked harder than others.
    “Don’t worry,” my dad said. “The Dandridge case is almost over. I’m going to plead him out.