Free State of Grace by Sandra Moran

would mutter. “I thought it would be good for the girls to be able to play and not get bit.”
    It was at this point that my mother would throw up her hands in frustration.
    â€œAll grass has chiggers, John,” she’d say. “It’s grass. It’s in its nature to have bugs. Besides, it wasn’t about chiggers. It was just another one of their attempts to control us. It’s just like that stupid truck.”
    Mention of “the truck” always made my father wince. It was a story that had become legend in our family. It had been a Saturday afternoon less than a year into my parents’ marriage. My mother and her sister, Glenda, had driven into Winston to see a movie and because my mother had just washed her black 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible, my aunt drove.
    â€œI loved that car,” my mother would sigh each time she retold the story. “It was my first car and it was so pretty .”
    Having heard the story so many times, I almost feel as if I had been there for what happened when my mother and aunt returned home and saw the dented, white pickup truck parked in the spot previously occupied by the convertible.
    In my imagination, my mother storms into the house calling my father’s name.
    â€œWhere is my car?” she asks when she finds him. Her voice is anxious and panicky.
    My father, I can imagine, looks up from whatever he is doing. When they were first married, he was rail-thin with a dark flattop, thick black glasses, and big ears. In my mind, he is fixing something or tinkering with a radio or something. I imagine him poised with a screwdriver in his hand and a cigarette smoldering in a nearby ashtray. Buying time, he picks up the cigarette, takes a drag and looks at my mother.
    â€œI traded it,” he says through the smoky exhale. “Dad heard about this good deal down at the station and—”
    â€œYou traded it,” she interrupts tightly, a statement rather than a question. “For what? And don’t tell me it’s that battered truck outside.”
    My father shrugs, trying to appear calm, but also knowing that the arguments he crafted in his head all the way back from my grandfather’s service station, would only dig him deeper into the hole he had created.
    â€œWe needed a truck,” he says.
    My mother stares, angry, disbelieving.
    â€œWe needed a truck?” she repeats. “Really. We did? John, that was my car. My car. You had no right to trade it without mypermission. If we needed a truck so badly, why didn’t you trade your car for it?”
    â€œI thought you could drive my car,” he says. “I’ll drive the truck.”
    I can only imagine my aunt taking in this discussion, her eyes darting back and forth as she watches this verbal tennis match.
    â€œJohn, I don’t want to drive your car,” my mother says acidly. “I want to drive my car—the car I brought to this marriage. I want to drive the car you traded without my permission and the car you’re going to go get back. If you want that stupid truck so badly, trade your own damn car.”
    My father shakes his head.
    â€œI can’t,” he says and jumps up to come around the table and stand in front of my mother. “It’s done. But I’ve got good news. I got $100 on top of the trade. We can buy that new vacuum you want.”
    Later my mother would say, “I should have known then that this marriage was going to end in divorce.” And it did. But that would come years later after many unresolved arguments.
    One of the things my sister and I had to be careful of when we played outside was not to get on the nerves of Mr. and Mrs. Spencer. My mother insisted they were nice people, just old and, because they never had children, unused to the noise and chaos. My sister and I knew better, though, having more than once been on the receiving end of Mrs. Spencer click-clacking down the back steps onto