Small Acts
For Exercise

Repossessed

August 25, 2026 · Part 4 of 10 · 2 min

He got to the truck before the driver got out, waving both hands like he was flagging down a plane. "Wait — hold on — can we talk?"

The driver, a heavyset man with a clipboard, looked unmoved. He'd clearly had this exact conversation forty times that year. "Locke, Warren? Sedan, silver, plate ending 4-4-7?"

"That's mine, yeah, but—"

"Account's thirty-one days past due. I got a court order and a set of keys. You want to make this easy, walk inside and don't watch."

Warren didn't walk inside. He stood on the driveway in his work boots, arms crossed like that might hold something together, and watched a stranger load his car onto a flatbed in under six minutes — the same car he'd once taught Micah to buckle his own seatbelt in, the same car with a booster seat still bolted in the back that nobody had thought to remove.

The truck pulled away. The driveway looked enormous and empty.

That afternoon, walking the kids home from school, Junie asked where the car had gone.

"Getting fixed," Warren said. "Needed some work."

"Is that why we're walking?"

"Partly," Warren said, and hated himself a little more with each word. "Mostly it's exercise."

Micah didn't ask anything. He walked a few steps ahead the rest of the way, hands jammed in his pockets, and that evening Warren found him in the garage — not the driveway, the garage, where the booster seat now sat alone on the concrete, brought back inside by the tow driver at the last second out of some private mercy.

Micah was crouched next to it, not touching it, just looking.

"Dad," he said, without turning around. "Where's the car really?"

Warren opened his mouth to say fixed again, the word right there, worn smooth from use — and stopped. His son was ten years old, sitting next to an empty booster seat in an empty garage, and Warren realized, with a clarity that scared him, that Micah already knew. He wasn't asking to find out. He was asking to see if his father would finally tell him the truth.

Warren didn't get the chance to answer. Behind him, the garage door light flicked on, and Yolanda's voice came sharp through the dark: "Warren. The school called. It's about Junie."

Continue the story Part 5: What the Teacher Saw →

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