A surprise ending in an Ann Beattie story

Shifting is one of Ann Beattie's better-known early stories ("The New Yorker Stories") - I think perhaps because it's one of the most traditional of hers, and therefore one of the easier ones for readers unfamiliar with her work and her style to approach and comprehend. Unlike most of her early stories, with their complex network of characters and their sense of a narrative cast adrift, shifting about without a clear arc, without a direction, a style that could be called aimless - but aimless with a secret direction, in that the meandering structure of the stories accurately captures the meandering and aimless qualities of the lives of the characters she creates, and of the mood of her generation in fact - in Shifting we get a rarity for Beattie, a story focused on a single, central action: childhood sweethearts who marry and then grow (or she grows) disappointed in the tepid quality of their life together, come to a minor crisis over an old car (she has inherited it) that they agree to sell so as to invest the money wisely but she doesn't want to sell it; she takes lessons to learn to drive a shift (the pun of the title - also, little-known fact, Beattie's dad was a driving instructor, if I remember correctly), then has a brief affair with the much-younger instructor. It's a tiny little drama, a life story compressed into a few pages and centered on a single image, in other words a typically fine story but not greatly representative of Beattie - until ! - the last sentence - it's as if she knew she didn't want to end the story with an image, as so many of her stories do, but with a narrative shock: She ends (can't quote it exactly but something like this): This was in Philadelphia, in 1972. So she strikes the exact opposite of the expected note, and ends as if this were a documentary or even a police procedural: this was real, this isn't a story, this happened. She always, always, surprises us - and of course the best surprises are those that come when we expect them least.