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It was true that I did have something else to look forward to. Rather than listening to the podcast while he had waited for me, it seemed like he had spent the entirety of my driving test texting with his grandson Oliver. He had also sent many pictures, some of me standing at the counter, a few where he had snuck around to witness me leaving the parking lot, a very blurry one that he swore was me coming back in, and then several as I grinned and held up my temporary license.

Oliver had sent the blurry one back to me. “This is my favorite,” he wrote. “Could be you or literally any other car and driver in the city of Detroit.”

“I don’t think that’s me,” I’d answered. The person behind the wheel in that shot was a blurry blob, but it was a tall, blurry blob.

“I can clearly see your license. Congratulations,” he’d told me. Then he had said that we should go out and celebrate, which I agreed to, immediately. It meant that I would need to re-shower and re-dress, because I hadn’t worn a coat during the test but had still sweated through all my clothing, just like I had when I’d first started running this summer.

When I got home, I sang along when I turned on the water in my shower. “When the things you've planned, need a helping hand, I will understand, always.” My voice may have been very bad but I didn’t mind it and no one could hear me in here. I’d been getting more and more of the rest of the song, too.

I said that to Oliver when he came down to get me a few hours later. “I think I know the whole first verse,” I announced when I opened the door.

He frowned. “It’s getting easier to hear?”

“Isn’t it for you?”

“I’m not sure,” he answered as I locked my door. “I always use noise-canceling earbuds now, the whole time I’m home. I don’t hear anything.”

“And you don’t see the glitter?”

As we got to the stairs to the lobby, he opened the door and then admitted, “I can still see the glitter. I try to ignore it.”

“I can’t. It’s even thicker now, enough that it seems like I’ll be covered in it when I get out of the shower.”

“Let’s talk about something else tonight,” he suggested. “Let’s talk about your license. Do you want to drive us?”

I didn’t need to sweat through this new outfit, too. “No, thanks. I’d like to take a break for a while,” I said. “Why don’t you do it this time?”

He did and I sat gratefully on the passenger side. “Have you thought about a car for yourself?” he asked as we drove out of the overly narrow parking garage. Who had designed that monstrosity?

“I have thought about it,” I said. “I was thinking that I need more time to think about it. My mom and I never had very good luck with cars.”

“Breaking down?”

“Just breaking,” I replied. “We lost bumpers, mufflers, a door, the soft top of a convertible. She wasn’t into maintenance.”

“I remember you saying that the commune in California was neglected. I looked that up.”

“What?” I turned so that I could see him, since I no longer had to maintain a laser-focus on the road. “Why?”

“I was curious. You said it was a big piece of land but I didn’t understand that it was hundreds of acres. Two-fifty.”

I hadn’t known that, either. “We didn’t use most of it.”

“Now no one uses any of it. It’s all abandoned buildings but I looked up the property records. There’s one owner, the Journey Truman Irrevocable Trust. That’s your mother?”

“Yes, that’s my mom. I didn’t know that she had bought that land. I wonder why she held on to it for so long.”

“I would think that there aren’t a lot of prospective buyers for an undeveloped chunk of desert, far away from any urban center,” he pointed out.

“Probably not. I bet that she owns more than that because she has a problem with buying rather than renting or leasing. It was the same with the cars. She would get one, let it gradually crumble, and then leave it where it fell. She did that with the houses she bought and I guess the land, too, like the commune. She would just let everything disintegrate when she got tired of it.”

“I don’t like that way of thinking,” Oliver said. “I can understand wanting to overlook problems, but if you leave a car to rust or you let a house slowly deteriorate, eventually it will become someone else’s problem.”

“I agree. It’s better to care about things. It’s also better, for some people, to be a renter. Like me at the Milaflores Building.”

“Not me.”

“Do you own this car?” I asked.