My parents ask me to give up on Betsy. My wife tells me to put her to pasture. My kids are too young to care, but I suspect they’re beginning to recognize her as part of the family, as I have these past 15 years and counting.

A sheen of gorgeous rust creeps across her doors. Her front hubcaps are gone, lost years ago, God remembers how. I won’t replace them. The driver’s side door lock jams and that window doesn’t work. With repeated attempts, it might roll down a notch. It almost never rolls back up.

I say good for Betsy. Keep the chicanery of this Botox-lipped, hair-plugged world at bay. We have each other and potholes. This is us, not some choreographed reality show marriage. We go on, and we go on together.

At 219,000 miles, Betsy isn’t the shiniest four-door compact on the road. She doesn’t have to be. Like the workhorse she is, my Toyota Corolla has carried my escalating weight through my 20s, my 30s and now into my early 40s, traversing the decades with the same dog-eared loyalty she’s offered me across unforgiving cities, relentless jobs, unemployment, underemployment, failed relationships and all the other hilly eras of my life.

That deep depression at 26? Betsy rolled me on out of Massachusetts and drove me up to New York City to slough off the past. For weeks I slept on my sister’s couch, taking catering gigs as they came.

It takes a special talent to own a vehicle in Brooklyn. Do you know they sweep the streets twice a week? Ask Betsy about waking to a line of cars double-parked on a narrow road during “alternate-side parking hours”. Whenever workers from the nearby elementary school boxed her in, I’d walk the halls half-panicked, begging teachers to let Betsy out to run free so I could serve hors d’oeuvres.

Betsy was fuel-efficient before it was cool, small and nimble and urban from the start. And like a fool, I asked her to take me from the crowded streets of Boston and Brooklyn and high-season Cape Cod to the gravel roads of Dakota County, Minnesota, where I started covering courts and crime for this paper a dozen years ago.

And like a fool, she followed — imagine driving a compact from Brooklyn to Minneapolis in January! — without complaint. They say that love is blind. I say that love is a pebble in your oil pan, one you choose to keep.

But oh, how Betsy has suffered. She’s survived an engine replacement, too many blown or leaky tires to mention — I recall a memorable flat at dusk near a highway underpass near the Wisconsin/Illinois border — and untold scrapes and bruises. I tell her she’s zero to 60 in 90 seconds. She doesn’t always laugh.

One morning I woke to a letter of apology on Betsy’s dash. Someone had backed their car down a steep drive into her chassis, leaving a dent and their phone number. I tossed the note away. She wears her scars with pride, this one. No apologies necessary for life lessons learned hard.

Time and again, Betsy has overstayed her welcome at downtown parking meters, but she’s never overstayed her welcome in my multitasking heart. One day I met a woman who had no great love of cars. When her own car broke down, she gave hers away.

“What will you drive?” I asked this strange intruder in my driving life. “We’ll just share Betsy,” said my new friend, unblinking, with a shrug. And we have, for almost seven years.

It’s complicated, this marriage between her and me and Betsy, full of constant coordination, and yes, some conflict. You can’t expect to share a thing from a distance. You’re all in or you’re out.

And I’m all in for Betsy, and her tape player. Did I mention she plays cassette tapes? She plays all the best cassette tapes: Counting Crows, Nine Inch Nails, Fleetwood Mac, Learn Portuguese. Some disappointed, would-be thief once rifled through her tape collection overnight, leaving it all behind, even the emergency pencil for manual rewinds.

I know that Betsy’s dying. Some nights I dream she’s been towed or lost a wheel, that she’s spun off the map forever. I wake at night to check on her from my bedroom window. Her failing automatic locks are up, an advertisement to the car thieves who never came.

No no no, I’m not ready to say goodbye. You know what it’s like to have a thing that is ugly and damaged to everyone but valuable to you? If you do not, may you someday have that grace. May you someday have that peace. May you someday have that love.

May you someday find your Betsy.