The Father In Law Who Faked It
Rodney’s Rentals
The shift had a name, and the name was Rodney’s Rentals.
It started small, the way these things always do. Rodney had an old Ford flatbed sitting mostly idle in the side yard, and a neighbor down the road needed to haul some fence posts for a weekend and offered him sixty dollars for the use of it. Rodney took the sixty dollars, and something clicked behind his eyes.
Within eight months he’d picked up a second truck at an auction in Bryant, then a third, then two riding mowers he rented out to men in town who didn’t want to maintain their own equipment for two acres of grass they mowed twice a month. He put a hand painted sign at the end of the driveway. He started fielding calls from hay haulers and weekend contractors all over that end of the county, men who needed a truck and trailer for a job and didn’t want the overhead of owning one outright.
Rodney told every single one of them the same thing when they asked about upkeep. He told them he handled all the mechanical work himself. He’d worked on engines his whole life, he’d say, tapping the side of a hood like it was a piece of livestock he’d raised from a calf. Trust the equipment, because he personally kept it running.
He had not personally kept anything running. I had.
Every one of those trucks came through my garage on a rotation. Oil changes on schedule. Brakes before they wore down to metal on metal. A transmission rebuild on the flatbed that took me the better part of three weekends and cost me nothing but my own time and about four hundred dollars in parts I never asked to be reimbursed for. The mowers got blade sharpening, belt replacement, carburetor cleaning, whatever they needed to keep running for the next renter.
I did the math on it once, sitting at my own kitchen table on a Sunday night while Julia watched television in the next room. Four hundred dollars a truck, three trucks, two mowers at a hundred and fifty apiece some weeks. On a good month Rodney was clearing close to fifteen hundred dollars in cash rental income off equipment that I was maintaining for exactly nothing.
I never told Julia the number. Part of that was pride, the same pride that had made me want to be useful to her family in the first place. Part of it was something else, something I didn’t want to look at too closely: Julia was proud of her daddy. She’d grown up believing he was a natural with anything mechanical, that it ran in the family the way blue eyes or a bad knee runs in a family, and I didn’t want to be the one who took that belief away from her. So I let Rodney tell his customers whatever he wanted to tell them, and I kept showing up on Saturdays, and the quiet arithmetic of the whole arrangement sat in my chest like a stone I’d swallowed and never mentioned to anybody.