I was up at five, coffee black, studying an old textbook from trade school. The road test for my new van was in two hours.
I flipped to a diagram on refrigerant cycles and a piece of paper fell out. A child's drawing.
A house, stick figures, a washing machine with circles for buttons. She wrote 'Daddy fixing the washer' in wobbly letters. Back when we were all together.
Also tucked inside was her school photo, wallet-cropped with scissors. I did that myself so it would fit in my work wallet. That wallet's been empty of photos for six months now.
The morning of the road test. I sat in my truck, that drawing on the dashboard. The engine hummed. I was nervous, but not about parallel parking.
I thought: maybe the real test isn't this license. Maybe it's what I can carry of her—in a wallet, in a textbook, across every empty room.