My wife’s car has forty thousand more miles on it than it should. She drove to work and back, eleven miles round trip, four days a week, and I did the math twice because I didn’t believe it either. She’s been gone since March, and I only added it up while doing the estate paperwork. I told myself she ran errands, because everybody runs errands. Forty thousand miles is not errands. It’s a second life.
The dealer pulled the service history for me, and there were oil changes from a town four hours north, every three months, going back to 2015. The name on those invoices wasn’t hers. It belonged to a man I had never heard of. I asked the dealer whether the records could have been entered under the wrong customer, but he said the VIN matched every time. Then he showed me something else: the mileage recorded at each service. The numbers climbed steadily, almost exactly forty thousand miles above what my wife’s odometer showed.
I searched the man’s name and found an address in that same town. I drove there on Saturday and found a small house with a detached garage. An older man answered the door and became visibly uncomfortable when I showed him the photograph of my wife’s car. He said he had seen it many times over the years, but he insisted my wife had never been the one driving it. Then he asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for. He wanted to know whether she had ever told me about the blue folder.
I asked what blue folder he meant, but he wouldn’t explain. Instead, he went into the garage and returned with an envelope containing several photographs. Every photograph showed my wife’s car parked outside different buildings in that town. The earliest was dated 2015, and my wife was standing beside the driver’s door in every one. On the back of the final photograph was a handwritten note in my wife’s handwriting. It said, “If he ever asks about the mileage, tell him I was never the one driving it.”:::
