Never told her how she’d seen a million men like him, Mama’s man-friends and her own diner customers, men who sized up women as if looking at a car they might buy and run into the ground, a thing to be entered and exited at a whim, allowed or denied proper maintenance depending on the time and resources required, trotted out or hidden, crashed to smithereens and called an accident or an act of God and left behind to rust.
