When You Lose Everything
Jan and I stepped into the license plate renewal office on a raw March afternoon, the kind of cold that settles in your bones and stays. We had just come from the car emissions testing center next door, a squat, gray structure tucked between warehouses and truck lots, the kind of place built for function, not comfort. To get there, we had driven past gas stations, cracked parking lots, a UPS storefront where Jan once reported for training as a package handler during a winter when money was tight. It all felt like the husk of something past its prime, an echo of an industrial age still trying to make itself useful.
Everything felt cold. Uncertain. We’d been reading about a recession, job loss, more inflation, on-again-off-again tariffs, Medicare and Social Security being threatened.
Our futures being threatened.
But we were together. Facing the strange times together, as we’d handled uncertainty, setbacks, and loss in the past.
The emissions test itself created the unease of a final exam. A pass-or-fail exercise in possible humiliation. We knew the feeling well. Years ago, we drove home in disgrace more than once, our clunky Cutlass Supreme betraying us repeatedly at the last moment. Today, the woman who conducted our test broadcast the dull-eyed exhaustion of someone who had long since stopped caring about the outcome. Then we said something about the weather, the cold that wouldn’t break, and she softened.
The license renewal office was too small for the number of people inside it, though a sign by the door insisted on a six-person limit. A young man in a plastic chair picked at the skin around his fingernail. A woman in front of us wore a long puffy coat and emerald-colored eyeglasses, the frames bright against her tired expression. She was small, maybe seventy, and she pulled a checkbook from her purse with the hesitation of someone who already knew what was coming.
The man at the counter, round-faced and soft-spoken, told her the total.
“What?”
“There’s a late fee,” he said, glancing down at the papers in front of him. “This is for April of last year.”
A year. She had been driving with expired plates for almost a year. I smiled. The man behind me, sunglasses pushed up into his graying hair, did the same.
“Last April was a hard month,” she said simply. “I lost my husband. He died unexpectedly.”
We stopped smiling.
The man behind the counter blinked. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice still flat, as though sorrow was just another transaction.
She tore the check from her book, passed it to him without looking up.
“Would you like to renew for this April while you’re here?” he said.
She stared at him as if he had asked something impossible.
“What?”
“You just paid for last year. You’ll owe for April of this year soon.”
She sighed, a breath that came from somewhere deeper than frustration.
“What a ripoff,” she said. Flat. Matter-of-fact. Then, after a pause, “OK. Sure. It’s only money.”
She said it the way people do when they’ve already lost the thing that mattered.
Jan and I quietly left the office together with our plate renewed. We’ve suffered loss. But we’ve not lost the thing that matters most.
Not even close.
