Once, I got a crush on a nice girl in my class who happened to be Doc Dix’s daughter Berta. Our ancient third-grade teacher seemed to know something I didn’t. She actively discouraged my interest. She changed our seats. Teacher even put us in different reading groups, though Berta seemed almost as smart as me.

Though I am technically listed as a “junior,” Mom’s early insistence made me, fussily, C. Meadows Delman. (Grace’s folks were the family-proud Meadowses.) “One Clyde Melvin per household is quite a sufficiency, thanks,” my mother said. Dad just laughed.

4.

Now I wish I’d kept his Packard Clipper De Luxe Sedan. “Eight cylinders in line, treated aluminum alloy, 14 mm. spark plugs. Oil Capacity: 7 quarts. 165 horsepower.” I can just picture my two daughters out for a joyride in it, wearing dark glasses and windblown head-scarves, laughing while waving. When he died on the road—in a motel—Mother had his car towed home, then sold it to the Shell station’s owner.

Dad’s spiffy Packard—a ship’s-wheel Clipper insignia set on both dash and trunk—was rigged with gizmo comfort items, every available car-lover’s convenience. Racks to hold your Kleenex tissues (though a single dusty box of those lasted my entire childhood).

There was a tire-pressure gauge tied with a black tassel like a diploma and it would—if held up to the light—show you one very blond lady whose red dress drained away like thermometer mercury to reveal her pink skin, her two red nipples so heavy-handedly retouched, they seemed an affliction to be pitied, and possibly needing to be somehow (I could now faintly imagine) helped with. “Don’t look at that, son,” he told me every Sunday I looked. “Got to throw that out. Been meaning to. It’s left from when I was a wild drunk always panting after the ladies. Looking like I do, even the ladies o’ Spain in red kinda resisted.” “Oh,” I said. There were separate maps of Canada and Mexico and the forty-eight states I would pore over just in case we two took off like wild geese, because we could. There was a plywood implement, enameled gray and looking made in special-ed shop class, for holding six of your beer cans; though Dad no longer drank anything wilder than an ice-cold Nu-Grape. Which left his flat lips as noticeably purple as two matching holiday novelty items. And of course there was the Bible, one known to us club members as “a Nurses’ White.”