My Unsentimental Education

a long time ago. He could go either way, I knew. He was the gentlemanly trucker sometimes celebrated in country song who rides the highway doing right by women and children, or tough enough to do me wrong and never look back. My options were shrinking. In an apologetic voice, I said my car was leaking transmission fluid.
He crawled under my car to look. “Yup, transmission,” he yelled, muffled.
He slid back out, stood up, looked at my worldly goods piled in the backseat, a pillow, blankets, the old-fashioned lampshade resting against the window. “You heading somewhere?”
I said, “Salt Lake City.” The future, I thought. Rock candy mountain where bluebirds sing. Or at least my last stop before I’d settle and friends would stop being bit players and match each other, become a circle, a unity, and all my selves would match too.
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s a ways to go yet. You got family nearby?”
An aunt I barely knew lived four hundred miles the wrong way. I didn’t say that. I said, “I’m moving. I’m about halfway there.” He looked at the car again, then asked how long I’d been at the truck stop, and I said just long enough to pump gas and pay for it.
He said, “Then I don’t think you’ve lost much fluid. It would have been up in the gears out on the highway. These bolts have just shook loose. Looks like someone put them on and didn’t tighten them except by hand—like he plain forgot to go back in with the electric wrench. But why anyone would mess with the transmission pan? Makes no sense.”
My idea, of course.
The mechanic had said leave well enough alone. Still, he’d messed up the last step.
“Where you spending the night?” the trucker asked.
“I thought I’d drive into Laramie,” I said. The sun was gone now, gone.
He said, “Look, I’ll tighten these bolts for you with my wrenches. Then get yourself to Laramie. In the morning, go to a mechanic and tell him to check your transmission fluid level and use power tools to get these bolts fastened down. I know a fair enough mechanic in Laramie.” The trucker took out a card and wrote on it. “Tell him I sent you and to fix that transmission pan right.” He left and came back with his tool box. When he slid out from under the car, he said, “I tightened them as tight as I could.”
“Thank you,” I said. What else was there to say?
He disappeared, never to be seen again.
This kindness-of-strangers story matters because, years later, when I’d married a second time, my second father-in-law liked to run the dinner table conversation by asking everyone—his sons and daughters and their spouses; his wife’s sons and their spouses; the next generation; even a great-grandchild because one of the granddaughters got pregnant in high school—to each take a turn telling a story on a subject he’d pick. This night he asked us to describe the bravest moment of our lives so far. Someone said when he was in a 7-Eleven during a holdup. Someone else said parachuting. A step-sister-in-law said waiting through her baby’s fever. I said breaking down at a truck stop west of Cheyenne in an old car, with no money, lying underneath the car, and hearing a stranger’s offer and coming out from under to reckon with it. My father-in-law said, “That felt unsafe?”
I said, “I mean I had to be calm even though I was scared because I’d staked everything on this move.” My second father-in-law cut his beef. “Hmm,” he said, “I was expecting something about risk, a story about physical valor.” I remembered how tense I’d been while driving, gripping the wheel, shoulders sore from teeth-gnashing worry about money, about the car’s ability to get me across the continental divide, about bad job statistics for people with PhDs someone had shown me before I’d left Kansas, the pressure to publish in the next few years or forget about a job. “Physical valor, no,” I said.
How will we know it’s us without our past? John Steinbeck.
My second ex-father-in-law—not as nice as the first, not even close—vanished too.

In the Event of an Apocalypse
I drove around one mountain range and across another. I kept getting higher, ascension.
The air got thin. My ears popped.
Then my car propelled itself down, gravity in charge, road signs on both sides blurring by. “This must be the place,” Brigham Young is known to have said when he and the handcart pioneers arrived in 1846. He’d felt sure because the Wasatch Mountains stand guard to the east, the Oquirrhs to the west, the Traverse Range to the south, the Great Salt Lake a moat across the north and west, geographical barriers keeping outsiders out.
I moved into a tiny duplex, matching shotgun apartments. The other apartment housed the landlord’s devout cousin and the cousin’s wife. The landlord told me their apartment was identical to mine. “Not a great layout,” he said, “because tenants use common walls at the same time.” My neighbors and I opened matching front doors at the end of the day, cooked dinners in adjacent kitchens, sat in adjacent living rooms, turned out lights in adjacent bedrooms; in the morning, we scrambled for the last of the hot water in adjacent bathrooms.
These dual apartments might seem symbolic: on the one side, husband and wife; on the other, a misfit typing into the night, quiet typing, clicking. I’d bought a computer when my student loan arrived, chunks of plastic that cost more than I’d so far spent on a car. But no. I didn’t want my neighbors’ life. And I wasn’t sure about my own. My landlord, who’d described himself as “a congenital Mormon, born that way, not my fault,” told me the neighbor-wife was nice but to avoid the husband, who’d try to convert me, or shun me. He shunned me, no preamble. We spoke once when he banged on my door to say that leaving my porch light