When people in real life find out I’m writer, they love to tell me, “You should put that in a book!”
Bless their hearts, they’re usually wrong. They’re always trying to help, and I love them for it, but the things people think should be ripped from the headlines of real life—their grandparents’ sweet love story, a wild coincidence that happened to their best friend, the time they single-handedly saved a small dog from a puddle—are never what actually makes it into a book.
You know what did make it into a book? My friend Lynn’s* ancient Ford Bronco.
When I was writing Enemies With Benefits, Eli Loveless needed a car. He’d just moved back to town after ten years away. He was living in his mom’s attic. He was still getting back on his feet. He had a decent job, but needed the car before he had any money to spend on it, so chances were he’d wind up with something that his brother’s friend’s uncle’s mechanic would be willing to give him a deal on. It needed to be iconic and memorable, but not necessarily in a good way.
Enter: my high school friend Lynn’s Bronco. (Important background info: I grew up in rural Virginia.)
To my understanding, there are generally two schools of thought regarding car safety: make a car small and maneuverable so it can more easily escape accidents, or make a car such an enormous, unfuckwithable tank that nothing could possibly hurt the passengers inside.
Lynn’s parents subscribed to the second school of thought, and that’s why she got the Bronco. The thing was massive. It handled like a nightmare. It may have been older than us**. The passenger practically needed a tin-can telephone to talk to the driver. The radio station, as if it knew exactly where it was, only picked up the nearby country station and not the equally nearby adult contemporary station. The interior smelled as if it had had a dozen owners, six of whom smoked, eight of whom owned dogs, two of whom hauled paint thinner for a living, and at least one of whom had a serious fetish for those tree-shaped air fresheners. You practically needed to get a running start to jump up into the cab.
And when we were sixteen, riding around the backroads of rural Virginia, we felt like gods. The AC didn’t work, so the windows were always down and the radio was always up. The dashboard was big enough for several hula girls and the backseat was big enough to get up to Some Stuff (though I never did, since it wasn’t my car). Lynn was a reasonably okay driver, but she was also sixteen and thought she couldn’t die, so had a habit of taking turns like she didn’t know where the brakes were. I know I felt the wheels lift from the road at least once, but I was also sixteen so I thought it was fun as hell.
It didn’t have airbags, a fact we discovered when Lynn hit a tree because she wasn’t paying attention. Miraculously, she was going slow enough that no one was hurt, and God knows the Bronco didn’t have a scratch. We did not tell our parents.
We also didn’t tell our parents about the time she knocked the passenger side-view mirror clean off by running into the guard rail on a one-lane bridge because another car started coming toward us. (This one wasn’t really her fault—it was a one-lane bridge and we were already on it, though whether there was a sign about it being one lane or everyone was just supposed to know, I don’t remember.) After we stopped screaming we collected the mirror out of the creek and duct-taped it back on. If anyone ever noticed, I didn’t hear about it.
Eighteen years later, writing in my apartment in Los Angeles while my newborn napped, I needed an iconic, memorable, rural-southern-realistic car for this guy I’d named Eli Loveless.
In my head, the passenger side mirror is still duct-taped.
Love,
Roxie
*not her real name
** for the car people who are going to try and figure out what model this Bronco was, we were driving it like teenage idiots from 2000-2002, so I’d guess mid-to-late 80’s or possibly early 90’s?
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