So I struck a deal with him whereby I would tend his yard until he “croaked” and the car would be mine. He signed the deed over to me a few days later but I kept the Mustang parked in his garage as I had planned to surprise Catherine with it on her birthday which wasn’t until January twentieth. Catherine didn’t make it that far so it was time, as I saw it, to collect my vessel and escape.

I walked through the garage man-door, past his greying wooden tool bench (covered with soiled red oil rags and two tins of oil- soaked engine parts) and his tall red mechanic’s tool box and his old blue air compressor and his red five gallon gasoline can and the sapphire- blue mustang convertible covered with a white tarp, and up the steps through the kitchen and into his living room. John and I had a comfortable arrangement where I was permitted to enter without knocking since his wife had died a few years earlier and he lived alone. I was welcome anytime, he said, although I wasn’t quite sure he meant that to mean the wee hours of the morning.

I found John asleep in his ratty old lime-green recliner beneath the heat-lamp that he had hanging above the chair. The heat lamp had scorched a hole in the top of the recliner once when he had the light drooping too low from its flexible mechanical arm and the burnt cavity at the top of the chair was covered with silver duct-tape.

John was snoring so I whispered, “Good morning John.”

“Whaaa?” his eyes popped open like two eggs on a skillet, wide and white with milky-yellow-grey irises. His frazzled white hair stood out in tufts above his large ears. His jaw was thin, and a matte of thick grey stubble graced his wrinkled pale face which was huddled above a teepee of yellowish-white wool blankets.

“Matt?” he squinted at me and then looked toward the window as if measuring the time of day by the amount of sunlight being broadcast into his living room , “What are you doing up so early?”

“I’m sorry to bother you John.” I felt a little guilty for bugging him at seven in the morning.

“It’s alright. The hour of the day doesn’t mean much at this stage of the game.” He reached for a grizzled yellow handkerchief and wiped his nose. “What brings you over here at this hour?”

“I have to go John. I’ve come to say goodbye…and to take the car if that’s okay with you.”

“Couldn’t wait til her birthday to give it to her huh?” He smiled big and his teeth appeared large against his gaunt grey face.

He obviously hadn’t been watching the television news and I knew that he didn’t receive the newspaper anymore (he told me that the news of this world didn’t mean much when you got close to the next) and he evidently hadn’t been out of the house to receive the news of Catherine’s demise or my incrimination from his friends or neighbors. John said that they all thought that death was contagious and so they kept away.

I didn’t want to waste a lot of time so I told a lie, “Yeah, I spilled the beans to her. We’re going to take a few weeks and head to Myrtle Beach and enjoy some sunshine. I thought it would be a good time. Do you mind if I take her today?”

“It’s your baby now Mathew. You take good care of her.”

I squeezed his hand, “You take care now, John.”

“If I’m gone when you get back…I’ll see you on the other side.” He laughed, and then went into a coughing fit.

“See you on the other side John.”

I slipped back into the garage and I opened the door and shuffled down the steps where I lifted the door-latch and tugged at the car cover until it slid off of the shiny blue mustang and then I slipped into the leather bucket driver-seat of my Mustang convertible. The keys were in the ignition where I’d left them. I turned the engine over and it came to life with a low muffled growl. I opened the garage door with the remote and pulled the car down the driveway, closed the garage door, and into the street where I parked it in front of the Crump’s house.

The street was still quiet and dark but I walked up the Crump’s driveway as though, again, it were my own, so as not to arouse suspicion. Back at my rear sliding glass door I retrieved the three suitcases, the gym-bag beneath my arm and the two large brown leather monstrosities in either hand, and I retraced my steps through the patch of woods and the Crump’s yard once again stepping over dead trees and wooded debris and down the driveway and I heaved the suitcases into the open trunk of the Mustang.

Back at the house I gathered the few things of value which I’d forgotten, such as Catherine’s pearl necklace and her diamond ear-rings (I wondered if she had worn them the night she had first slept with Uncle Henry), Sarah’s Game-boy and her red pouch filled with games, a picture of Catherine (for Sarah), and the little bit of cash still clasped inside Catherine’s change-purse, forty seven dollars (hardly compensation in my eyes for the wrong she had done me). I peeled back Sarah’s covers and I slipped her little body out of her pajamas without protest as she still slumbered. Her tiny pink feet were warm as I slipped her socks over her toes and up her ankles. I wedged a pair of pink cotton sweat-pants up her legs and lifted her to slide her matching sweatshirt over her head. She was dead-weight still as I slipped her jacket and hat onto her and slung her onto my shoulder. As I slipped down the Crump’s driveway for the final time I felt a sinful tingle of joy come over me at the thought of stealing my freedom from the clutches of tyranny; of leaving an old life behind, like a locust shedding its shell, to start a new life. I was almost giddy as I slid Sarah into her seat and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove slowly away.

As I pulled onto Erie road, though, I looked back at my yard and my house for what I assumed would be the last time ever. That house had been the only home that Catherine and I had owned. All of my memories were moored to its confines. The yard that I had mowed a thousand times and knew every rut and surface-grown root of; the driveway where I had played ball with Sarah, where Catherine and I had had snowball fights and played one- on-one basketball; soon to be a memory. The house which we had slowly remodeled room by room from the hovel it was when we bought it to the comfortable home we had made; soon to be the property of the bank. And the mortgage only eight years away from being paid in full. The only house that Sarah had ever known would be lost to us forever. I pulled away feeling the melancholy of mourning yet another loss while sensing awkwardly as though I had left something undone.

I hadn’t any clear plan, but the license plates on the Mustang were still registered to John and the car wouldn’t likely be missed for a long while and other than having to change our appearances, Sarah’s and mine, I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going. I only knew that my best chance at a free life with Sarah was to get the hell out; out of Willoughby; out of Ohio; and out of my life. I had read about people who had lived for decades on the run with false identities. I would find a way to do the same. I had to live free until Sarah was grown and no longer needed me. That was the scope and limit of my plan. The rest I would make up as I went along.

At the bank I used the drive-through automated teller to draw a total of eight- thousand dollars cash from my credit cards, the maximum from each one. I would have to wait until later in the day to withdraw my checking funds, a few thousand dollars.

I stole through the small city of Willowick, down Vine street, past the K-mart, the Wal-Mart, the Sunoco station with it’s yellow and blue sign which was open twenty- four hours, the Walgreen and Drug-mart pharmacies, and the mini shopping mall where the Tops grocery store had stood and right onto

State Route ninety-one and onto the freeway, State Route two, and westward onto Interstate ninety through Cleveland, its dirty houses and streets hidden behind embarrassingly pink concrete walls, and past the shore of Lake Erie where the torrid surf suspended a regiment of lake-gulls a few feet above and the water splashed so high against the break-wall that it showered the highway and my car with its spray more than one-hundred yards away, and past the towering buildings and choking smog of downtown Cleveland and the Cleveland Browns stadium where my heart had been broken so many times, now for me the last, and the Cleveland Indians stadium where my hopes had been raised and lowered like a roller- coaster ride since I was a boy, and on… to more pink walls and dirty houses and then the suburbs and out to the sweet smelling countryside with fields of corn, and cows and red barns and farmhouses and other cities with other pink walls which hid other dirty houses and streets.