By Herbert Hadad

Families celebrate many things at holiday time. That Christmas years ago, my three kids were celebrating the knowledge that they’d never again be picked up by the Chevy Malibu wagon. You could see it in their excited faces.

The Chevy, a fine-looking car when new, had taken us about without incident. But it had absorbed its share of tribulation—the worst, according to the children, administered by me. The paint I’d applied to all the faded and rusted spots had never matched the original color, rendering the wagon the vehicle of an itinerant junk peddler. The children ordered me to pick them up at least two blocks away from school or ball field. They liked it best when I arrived under cover of darkness.

But now the wagon was gone, traded for a Christmas gift for the whole family, a beautiful new dark-red Honda Accord sedan. We piled in and drove until we found an open gas station. Grandma, visiting for the holidays, bought the first fill-up. “Use your new car in good health,” she said.

Then the children made a request that surprised me: “Could we stop by for a last look at the Chevy?”

We found it on the dealer’s back lot, on the same spot where I’d tried to bargain with the man who specialized in buying wrecks. (He’d offered fifty dollars. “Give me and the car some dignity,” I’d said. We settled on a hundred.) The children walked around the car one more time. As we left the lot, I noticed in the rearview mirror that they were looking back.

“I thought you hated the wagon,” I said.

“The wagon was part of our family. We wanted to say goodbye,” said Edward Salim, the oldest and, at fifteen, about to become a driver himself.

For the next eleven years, the Honda became an important part of the family. The children fought over it during high school. They saved up and had an expensive sound system installed. It suffered the dings and dents of most cars in high use, and the scars of transporting two cats and a dog. Cigarette burns marred the upholstery.

It took all three kids to college. It took them to beach parties on the Jersey Shore, rock concerts in Maine, and a nightclub in Toronto, where fastidious felons removed the sound system and fifty compact discs, leaving the car otherwise intact.

Over the years, we acquired other cars. “Dad, you always said you liked Jaguars more than any other car,” one of the children said. “You work hard—why don’t you get one?” Though I gave an idle answer, actually I’d privately begun to covet a Mercedes.

I had never been car-crazy, not even as a teenager, but it was love at first sight when I saw the used “desert red” Mercedes 190E in a showroom. I sat behind the wheel and marveled as the salesman touched his fingers to the controls to open the roof, heat the seats, adjust the sideview mirror, make the back-seat headrests thump down out of sight.

Though the Mercedes was billed as the children’s gift to Dad, Dad was the one who began paying off the loan. The children gently ridiculed me when I refused to take the car out in the rain. After the dealership sent me a Christmas card, I felt such a personal bond that I sent one back to the salesman.

Later, we bought another old Mercedes, a black and “moon-rock gray” E320, and it felt very good, it felt defiant, that a husband and wife coping with accumulated bills were tooling around suburban New York in his-and-hers Benzes.

By the time last Christmas loomed, with the kids all grown and living elsewhere, the Honda was seldom used. We had parked it alongside the driveway by a patch of woods. Squirrels left acorns in the well below its windshield. Birds used it for target practice. It was often covered with matted leaves. It usually looked forlorn.

One chilly, gray Saturday afternoon, my wife, Evelyn, and I cleaned off the Honda, heading to buy a Christmas tree that would have to be tied to the roof of the car. But the battery was dead. We found cables, hooked the Honda up to one of our trophy cars, and jump-started it. It seemed to run fine.

Later that week, our son Charles Aram took the train up from Manhattan to borrow the Honda; he was going to drive it to a fraternity-brother reunion in Syracuse. That night almost became the last night of his precious twenty-four-year-old life.

The first call came from his cell phone almost an hour after he’d pulled out of our driveway. “Dad, I’m on the West Side Highway near 190th Street. The car kept speeding up. It went out of control, and the brakes couldn’t stop it.”

Charles explained that he’d finally spotted a shoulder alongside the highway, switched off the ignition, and rolled safely onto it. I thanked God for his cool head. “I can’t drive the car again,” he said. “I was lucky not to hit anyone else. Please get a tow truck.”

I began making calls, with maddening results. The twenty-four-hour emergency services didn’t want to go to Manhattan at night. “I can help you tomorrow morning if you want to call back,” one said.

At the local police department, the desk sergeant said, “Wait a minute—I’ve got a phone number for the NYPD for these kinds of problems.” Finally, a New York Police Department officer said she’d send help.

Charles had kept the headlights on to be more visible, but they began to grow dim. It was dark and cold. The lights went out. And then a new peril revealed itself: A carful of thieves cruising the highway pulled up behind the Honda. Charles saw them and slammed the door locks down.
“Dad, hurry! I’m freaking out,” he shouted into his cell phone. “Four men have surrounded the car. They’re trying the doors. Get help fast!”

I dialed the New York police again and told them it was urgent, my son was in serious danger. “We sent a car—we didn’t find him. We’ll try again,” the officer said.

“Please! Hurry!” I said.

A patrol car, its lights flashing, arrived seconds after the marauding thieves had disappeared. The two officers waited with Charles until a tow truck summoned by the police dispatcher pulled up.

Back in our driveway, Evelyn and I embraced Charles as though we were welcoming him back from battle. The tow-truck driver was moved by the scene. “I know, I know,” he said in Spanish-accented English. “I’m a father, too.”

Considering his experience, Charles was remarkably calm. He hugged us goodbye, got into my 190E, and set off again for Manhattan.

In the days that followed, my feelings of relief over Charles’s safety gave way to another emotion, which began somewhere in my gut, rose through my chest and into my throat. It was rage. As crazy as it sounds, I was furious at the Honda. It had almost killed my son. Now I had to kill it.

We had the car towed to Tony, the mechanic in the nearest town. Tony and I had known each other for twenty-five years and half a dozen cars. When we weren’t discussing repairs, we talked about fishing or being out in the woods. (I’d never offered Tony a tip. I’d just leave a ten or a twenty in an envelope labeled “Donation for the Tony Bowman Fish and Game Club.”)

Tony listened quietly to the tale of Charles’s ride and my fury. He promised to look the Honda over to see if anything was worth salvaging.
A week later, I dropped by the station. I was pleased to see the Honda was gone. Tony stopped working in the repair bay, wiped his hands, and joined me outside.

“Parked it by the woods, did you?” he said. “The car didn’t just suddenly go to pieces. I found a mouse nest in the engine. The mice had gnawed at the wires. That’s why your son couldn’t control the car that night.”

I let it all sink in for several moments—the Honda’s demise, my son’s close call. “How dumb I feel, how humbled,” I told Tony.

I had railed against an eleven-year-old collection of metal and glass as though it had a will of its own, had ordered it executed. But a family of mice had been the cause, and they’d merely wanted to survive the deepening winter. It took the mice to remind me of the sweetness and frailty of all life.

Herbert Hadad, Northeastern graduate and prize-winning writer, wonders if the mice in his attic used to live in his car.