The Bill They Mailed Me After Christmas

I drove to the body shop the next morning and I paid the tow and storage lien out of my checking account, three hundred and forty dollars, and I got a receipt, and I told the man there that as an owner on the title I was taking possession of the vehicle and that no work was to be done on it, none, and that if Tyler Mercer or anyone else came to authorize repairs he should call Roy Tibbetts at Cornerstone before he lifted a wrench. He looked at me a little funny, a woman my age in a church-lunch coat laying claim to a rolled diesel, and then he looked at the title copy I had gotten from Roy with my name right on it, and he said yes ma’am.

Then I went to Cornerstone and I sat down with Roy and we sold the truck.

Roy knew a fellow, a rebuilder over in the next county who does exactly this, buys wrecked diesels and brings them back or parts them out. He came and looked at it that Thursday and he wrote a check for twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, which for a rolled truck was a strong number and which Roy said told him the drivetrain was as good as he’d guessed. Twenty-two five against a payoff of thirty-one two. That left eight thousand seven hundred dollars owed on the note, the deficiency, and I looked at that number, eight thousand seven hundred, and I thought about the forty-five thousand on Connie’s spreadsheet, and I wrote a check for the eight thousand seven hundred out of the money Harold and I had saved careful for thirty-one years, and I closed the loan.

My name came off of it. All the way off. There is no note anymore. There is no title with my name and Tyler’s and the little “or” between us. There is a canceled loan and a paid deficiency and a receipt in the drawer next to the little knife. I paid, in the end, about nine thousand dollars, of my own free choice, to buy my way out of a family that had decided I was worth nothing but the paying. I have made worse deals. I made one every Christmas for years and called it peace.

I did not call Dale. I did not call Connie. I did not send a spreadsheet. That was the part I had to hold myself to, because the old me wanted to explain, wanted to make them understand, wanted to be told I had been right. But you do not owe an explanation to people who mailed you a bill instead of an invitation. I let the truck being gone say it. I knew how they would find out. Tyler would call the shop to get his truck back to work, or he would drive by, and the truck would not be there, and the shop would tell him a co-owner had taken it and sold it, and it would go up the line to Dale and to Connie fast.

It took two days.

Dale called on a Saturday morning. I let it ring and I listened to the message. He was not warm. The warm is Connie’s job. Dale was loud, the way he gets, asking what in the hell I thought I was doing selling Tyler’s truck, that boy needs that truck, do I have any idea, and on and on, and underneath the loud I could hear the thing he could not say, which was that the ground had moved and he did not know where to put his feet. I did not call back that day. I let him sit in it.