Milly Strelzoff

The Paper Passenger

She sits, swaying, in the car parked facing mine, our front fenders almost kissing, an urban parking lot peck. I lose sight of her movements as my own car gets busy. Jackets on the kids, mittens on the kids, bathroom break for Jimmy. Seth sets off for the Starbucks we have pulled into, kids trailing him like a row of Christmas lights. Big smiles, some of them do not need a bathroom break, just a shopping break. We stopped counting after four.

I sit with the baby, making sounds she has heard a million times, inside me and outside me. She must know my inner workings. She presses herself to the waterfall in my tummy. I get her in a rhythm and look back up at the car parked in front of me. It’s beautiful, a new 2007 Volvo V50 Station Wagon. The large patchy beagle inside it is pacing, its owner obviously getting coffee in Starbucks. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and we are all sweaty from our weekend exertions. We’ve fueled the car; we needed it to make the last leg home. The Beagle is ping-ponging in the Volvo and each window fogs up in turn as he noses it.

Then I see the car has a still passenger: a pile of black foam-core boards bearing enlarged photographs of a man and a girl and several mountains. These are carefully mounted photographs. The girl has blond, perfect hair and she laughs and throws open her eyes, her smile cart-wheeling into the camera. The man is smiling at her -- dark hair, young good looks. There are several photographs taken on vacation. Then I look closer and the woman is not a girl; she is slightly older than I thought. I am intently watching the photographs, so I don’t see the late-thirties blond woman opening her door, but I see the dog jump. Then I see her, soothing him and getting in the car. Her photographic passengers are patted into place. She plants her cup and then backs out of the spot. I watch the out-of-state license plates heading out to yet another state, and then I see that the Volvo is full of her house and maybe her dreams. The back of the wagon is full of her luggage and belongings. She is moving.

My family piles back in, I put the baby back in her carseat, and I smile when my husband plants my coffee cup in the tips of my cold fingers.

I watch the woman’s car arc out of the lot. I’ll never know why the man in the photographs is riding as a paper passenger, or why his face is always turned away from the camera.

Milly Strelzoff is a writer, world traveler, and mother of three children who constantly inspire her. She is a computer programmer and an avid reader of all genres of fiction and non-fiction.