Excerpt:

My car has disappeared almost completely now. The only thing I have from it is one of the rubber ducks – the red one that looks like a devil – that sat on the console between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat the whole time I drove the car. I put those ducks in there the day I bought it. My niece had picked them out for me from a collection of rubber ducks she had that were all shaped like different things. That was on the trip that would be the Jeep’s last.

I named the new car Sophie. I loved it. It ran smoothly, all the time. I never had a problem with it. Very different from the Lemon Blue Jeep. Sophie was a Sea Foam Green Subaru Legacy four-door station wagon. I drove her to Philadelphia, from Charlottesville, Virginia, a few times, from Marlinton to Lewisburg a lot to visit mom and dad and sit in the coffee shop, from Marlinton to Lewisburg to Charlottesville to live, even from Marlinton out to the radio station on a daily basis for a while. I had her when I was still News Director at the radio station. Mom and dad thought she seemed like a News Director’s car. Someday I might own a car again.

“No one’s going to steal those ducks,” I had said to Mathias when I parked Sophie on the street my first time in Philly. He had advised me to bring everything in that was valuable and if there were any objects left in the car at all, to put them out of sight because someone would break a window to get to something even if it wasn’t worth anything. There were a few CDs on the floor in the backseat. I pushed them under the driver’s and passenger’s seats. I figured it was probably safe to leave the ducks in view. He thought it was a hilarious one-liner. It was very late at night. I had gotten lost and gone to New Jersey. There was construction on the Interstate, I missed the exit.

Someone has stolen one of the ducks. The one that looked like a calico cat, with a long tail and everything. They left the red devil duck. I wondered if whoever stole it was religious, maybe didn’t want to steal the devil. Maybe it was for their kid, and they thought a calico cat shaped duck was OK but not one like the devil.

It took them about nine months to steal Calico Cat Duck. I hope she’s still in use, that maybe a kid plays with her or someone uses her for a charm, maybe she rides on someone else’s console. Before they stole her, clothes went missing, odds and ends I never unpacked when I moved from Manton Street to 10th Street, a small white cardboard gift box crammed full of jewelry that didn’t have much monetary value and that I was sorry to lose. The CDs. Eventually the car.

I keep Devil Duck on my nightstand and once in a while, one or another of the many cats who live in this house comes by and snatches her. I find her all over the house. It’s amazing how wrong I was about these ducks. Everybody wants a piece of them.