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The Oracle at the Car Dealership

At the Van-Trow car dealership in Monroe, Louisiana where I bought my Toyota Camry, guys sat holding Styrofoam cups and smoked cigarettes while a few of us do-si-doed around the parking lot and I knew right away when I saw her, a sleek black four-door with a moon roof, or maybe everyone called it a sun-roof there, and the man who wrote up my paperwork had droopy pit bull eyes that made me want to sit down next to him; I was new to the area and asked how long he’d been selling cars and he said long enough but was thinking of retiring; he wanted to move closer to his Mom’s family in Texas or maybe he was going in for surgery, I don’t remember that part, anyhow, he asked me about myself, and I told him how I’d recently moved from California to be with my boyfriend when his eyes got even sadder and sank down to his sideburns, said he used to have a girlfriend from California but no more; she’d moved back to the coast. I asked what had happened; his girlfriend didn’t like the area much, he really didn’t know, but I knew he knew, and for a moment I felt he was an Oracle sitting in a swivel chair behind a metal desk explaining what my future would look like in several years, because even when there’s a prodigious amount of love, shit happens, and now I realize why his eyes were so sad—not because of him, but for me.