The Bill They Mailed Me After Christmas

Roy got on the line and he was glad to hear from me and sorry for how quiet it had been since Harold, and I let him be kind for a minute because he meant it. Then I told him I had gotten a letter about Tyler’s truck and I wanted to understand where things stood, and I wanted him to tell it to me straight like he was talking to a stranger, not a friend, because I needed the law of it and not the comfort.

Roy told me straight. The note was current, barely, someone had made December’s payment (I found out later it was me who made it, in a way, because Tyler had short-paid October and I had covered it in one of those quiet counter visits, and the math of it kept the account from ever going truly delinquent). The truck was wrecked and sitting, per what Roy could see, at a body shop in town, and the shop had put a mechanic’s lien notice in about the tow and storage. And yes, Roy confirmed, reading it off his own screen, I was co-borrower on the note and joint owner on the title. Ruth A. Mercer or Tyler J. Mercer. Both names. Full ownership rights, either one of us, that is what the “or” means.

I asked Roy the question I had driven home to be able to ask.

“Roy,” I said, “if I am an owner of that truck, the same as Tyler, can I decide what happens to it?”

There was a pause, but not Connie’s kind of pause. Roy’s kind, where a man is being careful to tell you true. He said that as a joint owner, yes, I had every right to possession of the vehicle, the same as Tyler did, and that either owner could authorize its sale, and that if I wanted to I could take the truck, physically, out of that shop, because it was as much mine as his. The shop’s lien for the tow and storage would have to be cleared, a few hundred dollars, but the truck itself, he said, “You’re on the title, Ruth. Half of that truck’s yours in the eyes of the state. More than half, the way you’ve been the one keeping the note whole.”

I asked him the second question. “And the loan. The thirty-one thousand. Am I obliged to pay the fourteen to fix it?”

No, Roy said. Absolutely not. There was no such thing as an obligation to repair collateral. My obligation, as co-signer, was to the note, the money owed, and only if the note went into default. It did not extend one inch toward a body shop. Nobody could make me spend a dollar making that truck pretty again. The repair estimate on Connie’s spreadsheet had no more legal weight than a grocery list.

And then Roy told me the thing that turned the key.