The Seven-Ten
When I was a girl in Cale, Nebraska, we counted cars from the porch. There wasn’t much else to do on a summer evening. My brother Danny and I would sit on the top step with a sheet of notebook paper and a pencil and keep score: a point for a pickup, two for a car, five for anything from out of state. Orchard Road was the only paved road through town, so everything that came through Cale came past our house. On a good night we’d get thirty points.
The Seven-Ten didn’t count. That was the rule, though I can’t remember who made it. It was a pale blue sedan, square and old even then, with chrome around the windows, and it came from the east end of Orchard Road at ten minutes past seven every evening from the end of school until Labor Day, and it went out the west end toward the grain elevator and the highway, and it never came back the other way. It drove slowly. It was always full. And everyone in it waved.
You waved back. That was the other rule. Everyone on Orchard Road did it, every porch, every yard, old men in lawn chairs lifting a hand, kids stopping their bikes. My father waved at it the way he waved at the mail carrier. It was just a thing that happened in Cale, like the sirens tested on the first Wednesday of the month.
It was Danny who noticed who was in it.
He was nine and I was eleven, the summer of 1987, and one evening he said, “That was the Ostranders,” and it was. I’d been waving without looking, the way you did, but I looked then: Mr. Ostrander at the wheel with his ball cap, Mrs. Ostrander beside him with her arm out the window, the three Ostrander boys in the back seat in their church shirts, all five of them smiling and waving, and the car went by and out the west end of town.
The Ostranders lived four houses down. They were at that moment, as far as I knew, at home.
By the end of July they’d moved away. That’s how everyone put it. There was a For Sale sign one morning, and then there was a man from a bank in Kearney, and then the house was empty. No one I knew had seen them pack. No one said where they’d gone. When I asked my mother she said, “Oh, honey, people move,” in a voice that meant there was a whole room behind the sentence and I wasn’t allowed in it.
After that, Danny and I kept a second list. We didn’t talk about it much. We’d sit on the step with our scoring sheet and, at ten past seven, wave at the blue sedan, and then one of us would write a name on the back of the paper.
The Halvorsens, in August. The Weidners, the next June. Old Mrs. Betancourt alone in the back seat, waving with both hands like a girl. The Pflugs, the Ruiz family, both Mr. and Mrs. Teague and their dog, which had its head out the window. All of them gone within the month. Moved away. In the fall the school lost two teachers and a bus route. In 1990 the Lutheran church closed.
People who’ve never lived in a little town will tell you that’s just what happens to little towns. The young people leave for Omaha and nobody comes to replace them. That’s true. That happened to Cale too. But the young people who left for Omaha came back for Christmas.
What I want to explain is that we never stopped waving. Nobody did. I don’t know if anyone in Cale ever decided not to, and what happened to them if they did. I didn’t want to find out, and when I was old enough to think about it properly, I realized that was the point: it was a town of people who had all, privately, decided the same thing.
Our family was never in it. I watched every night for eight summers, until I left for college, and I never saw us. I used to think that meant something, that we were safe, or chosen, or simply overlooked. Danny left for the Navy at eighteen and was killed in a training accident at twenty-three, off the coast of California, and he was never in the car either. That was when I stopped believing it meant anything at all.
My father died in 2009 and my mother in 2014, both in the hospital in Kearney, both of ordinary things, holding my hand. Neither of them was ever in the car.
I came back to Cale to clear out the house, and then I just didn’t leave. I work remotely. The house was paid for. There are eleven people left in Cale now, by my count, all but me over seventy, and the grain elevator has been closed since I was in my twenties. Most evenings, I sit on the porch.
The Seven-Ten still comes. Same car. Same chrome. It doesn’t look any older. It’s the only thing in this town that doesn’t. It comes down Orchard Road from the east at ten past seven, from the end of the school year until Labor Day, though the school’s been closed for years, and I wave, and old Mr. Lindahl across the road lifts his hand from his lawn chair, and it goes out past the elevator toward the highway.
It’s been fuller lately. I started noticing a couple of summers ago. More faces in the windows than any car that size should hold, faces in the back window and pressed together in the front, and all of them waving, and I knew them. That’s the thing. I knew them all. The Ostrander boys, still in their church shirts. Mrs. Betancourt. The Teagues’ dog. Everyone who ever moved away from Cale, packed into the pale blue car as if they’d been waiting somewhere for the last of the town to catch up.
And it’s been slower. Every week a little slower. This summer it barely seems to roll.
Last night it stopped.
It stopped right in front of my porch, at ten past seven, engine idling, everyone inside still waving and smiling, and the back door on my side swung open by itself.
My mother was in the front passenger seat. She had her arm out the window, the way Mrs. Ostrander used to. My father was driving. And between the waving faces in the back seat there was a space, just one, a little worn, the exact width of an eleven-year-old girl, and in the seat beside it Danny was sitting at nine years old with the scoring sheet in his lap, and he looked up at me, and he patted the seat.
I didn’t move. I sat on the step and I waved, because that’s the rule, and after a long minute the door swung shut again and the car went on, slowly, out past the elevator.
I don’t know what my parents were doing in it. They never moved away. They died here, or near enough, with me holding their hands. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe it isn’t that the car takes people. Maybe it’s that eventually everyone from Cale goes, one way or another, and the car is just how they leave.
It’ll come again tonight, at ten past seven. I’ve packed a bag. It’s sitting just inside the screen door. I keep telling myself I haven’t decided yet whether to pick it up. But this morning, in a drawer of my father’s desk, I found one of the old scoring sheets, soft as cloth. On the back, below the Halvorsens and the Teagues and Mrs. Betancourt, there’s one more line in Danny’s nine-year-old printing. It’s our name. I’ve been trying all day to remember whether it was always there.