30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 29, Heartache

There was once a woman who wanted a car. She really wanted it. It was the one thing her father had never let her have, that feeling of independence. And so she waited and waited for it. When she was twenty, the picture of the car was on her refrigerator, shiny and new and red, a beautiful Ford, and though it was outdated, when she was thirty, and working in the city it stayed there, on her refrigerator, looking at her. She kept wanting it, and though men would ask her out to dinner, or lunch, or a drink, she thought about the car and she just kept working, saving, hoping someday she would make enough to get it.
When she was forty, she went looking for it. It was a twenty-year-old car by now, they said. It wouldn't work very well. But she found it, she found it in a junkyard, but there it was. She had it towed to a garage. She painted it bright red. She invested in every accoutrement. Finally, after a year, it was ready. The garageman called and told her it was ready; she smiled. Then she paled. She had never learned to drive.