How To Steal a Car by Pete Hautman

Author:Pete Hautman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

I had been looking at the photo of my grandma Kate a lot. I tried to imagine Grandpa John holding the camera and saying “Smile!” But the girl in the photo had only a sleepy half smile. You could see a little of her teeth, bright white against her dark lips and tanned skin.

Her cutoff jeans were tight and frayed, and she had a pale L-shaped scar on her right thigh. Or it might have been a birthmark. Her halter top looked like a T-shirt that she had taken scissors to. Kate—her name had been Kate Unger back then—had probably left her home in Michigan wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and maybe a jacket, but by the time she met Grandpa John in Monterey she’d cut off and thrown away half her clothes. She had been just seventeen—I looked up her birth date and figured it out—seventeen years old on May 10, 1967. She’d taken off for California the summer after her junior year.

In the photo she looked much older than seventeen and very erotic, like maybe right after Grandpa John snapped the picture they’d had sex right there in the middle of the day on the beach.

The Volkswagen in the picture was faded green—or maybe pink, or pinkish green, if there is such a color—with a yellow hood. I wasn’t sure if the two-tone effect was intentional, or if it was a junkyard patch job, or even if it was their car. The words in the margin of the photo—Kate—Venice Beach—1967—were maddening in that they did not give the month. The photo could have been taken anytime after the Monterey Pop Festival, which was in June—I looked that up too. My dad was born April 17, 1968, so Kate must have gotten pregnant in July. But when exactly had the photo been taken?

It was driving me crazy.

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