The Holy Blue

We went to look at cars.

Jimmy the mechanic has become our best friend. Since he couldn’t fix Serendipity, he’s made it his mission to find us another car somehow. On Monday, I put on my good dress and went to the other side of town with him to see a car dealer with a good reputation who’s known Jimmy since he was a kid, but the dealership closed at three and we just missed him. Yesterday, we tried again. I put on my good dress again, to look respectable. Michael put on his good shirt and came along with me, to look masculine, even though he doesn’t drive. The more masculine presence in buying a car, I’m told, the better. Jimmy picked us up in his rickety old SUV, with his boy along for the ride since his wife was at work. And we were off.

The air was so humid it felt like we were in the jungle. But the sky overhead was glorious blue.

I’ve barely been out of the house all summer. It felt alien to be zipping around town in someone else’s vehicle. Jimmy chatted about the infestation of groundhogs in town and how he’d been trapping them because they were digging around the foundation of his house. His boy told me fantastical stories of how he’d come over to my own porch at night to catch the beasts and stop them from poaching my pumpkins. I tried to look happy and conversational when all I could feel was carsick. Carsick, and nervous. I just want this to be over. I want my freedom and mobility back. I want to go somewhere.

We eventually ended up on a gravel lot tucked back from the road, among some impressive shale foothills.

There was a little building, powder blue like the sky, with a sign that said “IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT WE SAY “MERRY CHRISTMAS” AND “GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS!”” Those signs are ubiquitous around the valley. I wondered how it would play out if I roared “MERRY CHRISTMAS AND GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS!” instead of “Hello” at Jimmy’s old friend, when we were introduced. But Jimmy’s friend wasn’t there. There was a hand-lettered sign that just said “I’M IN THE BACK” next to the demand for a merry Christmas.

We walked around back and between rows of old cars. Some had tags in the windows boasting of the cars’ features, but many had nothing. Some looked beautiful and some had seen better days.

Eventually, we found the mechanic’s garage at the very back of the lot. The man working there was not Jimmy’s friend, it was the assistant. He didn’t know when Jimmy’s friend would be back. Best to call ahead if we wanted to catch him.

Jimmy looked ready to leave right away and come back when his friend was there, but his boy had already scampered off to play in the weeds at the edge of the gravel lot, and I was already autistically wandering off to admire a Honda. Honda has one of the only logos I recognize on a car. I know next to nothing about cars, but I’ve heard that Hondas are reliable, so I want one. This Honda wasn’t for sale, however; they were going to fix it up in the garage first.

Jimmy floated his idea of trading in my old car for them to fix up in the garage and sell, for the whole cost of a down payment, so I could begin making payments in September. He’d been pretty sure this would work on his friend, but the assistant didn’t like it. “We don’t do that here. Usually you have to come up with half the cost of the car up front, and then we’ll put you on payments for the rest, but with no interest! And we sell temporary plates here for twenty dollars if you need.”

For the next several minutes, Jimmy’s boy played in the gravel and I wished I could join him. The assistant pointed to sedans and opened the hoods for Jimmy to admire, talking mostly to Michael and Jimmy. Jimmy pointed out features that might be nice or problematic, none of which even landed on my ear as real words but sounded like gibberish. I tried to look shrewd as I peered at engines, which all just look like machinery to me. There was a Dodge, and Jimmy always prefers to buy a Dodge. There was an Impala, a pretty name, but then I realized that an Impala is a kind of Chevy. That horrible car we borrowed last spring when the car was broken down was a Chevy, so I hate Chevys now. I smiled at the Dodge and frowned at the Impala.

At the very back, there was a car with a badly worn bright blue paint job. It just looked like a car to me.

“That’s your exact car,” Jimmy said.

At first, I didn’t know what he meant.

It turns out that Jimmy had found a car of the exact same make and model as mine, the same generation but a few years older. It had about the same mileage. It didn’t have the awful mildew smell that Serendipity had. It had an immaculate wiring harness with no tape or cracks on the wires. My car, only in working order, perhaps. The battery was dead so he couldn’t examine every feature just then. He cautioned me that the pedals showed a lot of wear and that could mean it was owned by a reckless driver. The bright paint meant it might have been a teenager. He’d have to carefully look it over for damage when we came back. But if I got it, I could stow Serendipity at his house and harvest her parts for repairs on this one whenever I needed.

The assistant joked with him about the horrendous paint job, but I liked the odd color.

I thought about the lady who told me that the French expletive “Sacre Bleu!” meant “Holy blood!” and then someone else corrected her that it actually meant “Holy blue!” They said it was one of those exclamations that started out as an ejaculatory prayer, calling on the Virgin Mary to cover you in her sacred blue mantle, and then turned into a swear word just like an English-speaker exclaiming “Jesus!” And it turns out that they were wrong too. “Bleu” rhymes with “Dieu,” so it’s a French way of saying “oh my gosh” instead of “oh my God.” But I still liked the idea of it being a prayer to the Virgin Mary best.

I wanted to buy this car and name it Sacre Bleu, as a prayer, and get a bumper sticker with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it. I wanted to find a can of ugly blue paint to spray over the worn patches so it looked nice, then fill the trunk with groceries to bring to the Friendship Room for their food pantry, as a thanks offering, when I got it.

The assistant said that the car was four thousand dollars plus tax, and Jimmy whispered to me that his friend would probably let me have it for 3500. The other two cars were the same price.

My mind began to race. I needed that down payment. Two thousand dollars, plus rent that’s due the fifteenth and the water bill that’s due in two days. We didn’t have any of that. After this horrendous summer of being sick for six weeks, we were behind on everything and ended up overdrawing the bank just before the first of the month. But it was such a small number. It seemed possible, when nothing has seemed possible for weeks.  An actual amount instead of just batting around possibilities. Maybe someone would buy Serendipity for about that price. Maybe something else would happen. I’d think of something.

“Sacre Bleu,” I said inwardly, as a prayer and not a curse.

I promised we’d be back within a few days with the money, and somehow, I believed it was true.

Jimmy collected his boy, who had found an excellent stick to use as a sword.

We all went back to LaBelle in better spirits.

The blue of the sky clouded over, ending in a torrential thunderstorm, but I hardly noticed. In my head, the sky was still bright blue.

“Sacre bleu,” I said to myself, and to the Virgin Mary, over and over again. “Sacre bleu. Sacre bleu. Sacre bleu.”

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.