The Father In Law Who Faked It
Without Me
Three weekends went by with me nowhere near Rodney’s garage, and the machinery of Rodney’s Rentals, which had been running on borrowed maintenance for two years without anybody but me knowing it, started to show what it actually was underneath the hand painted sign at the end of the driveway.
The first sign of trouble was small. One of the riding mowers threw a belt at a renter’s place on the far side of town, stranding a half mowed yard for three days while the renter waited on Rodney to come fix it. Rodney did not know how to change a mower belt. He never had. He drove out there, poked at it for twenty minutes, and told the man he’d have somebody come look at it, which meant nothing happened for three more days until the man gave up and returned the mower with an ugly note about a partial refund.
The second sign was bigger. The second truck, the one I’d rebuilt the transmission on two years earlier, started slipping gears again on a renter hauling scrap metal, because transmission fluid needs changing on a schedule and nobody had changed it since I stopped coming around. The renter brought it back complaining, and Rodney, who truly did not know where the dipstick was on that particular model, told him it was probably just cold weather doing something to the fluid, an explanation that satisfied nobody, least of all the truck.
Word travels fast in a county that size. By the third weekend, two separate men had mentioned to Elinor, at church of all places, that they’d heard Rodney’s equipment wasn’t holding up the way it used to. Elinor mentioned it to Julia. Julia did not mention it to me, not directly, though she did start asking, in a roundabout way, whether I thought Rodney’s trucks were older than she’d realized, whether maybe they were just wearing out on their own.
I told her trucks don’t wear out faster because somebody stops liking their son in law. I regretted saying it the second it left my mouth, because it was the first time in the whole ordeal I’d said something sharp back, and it landed exactly as sharp as I’d meant it to.
The Hay Contractor
The truck that finally brought the whole thing down belonged, technically, to Rodney, but it was carrying six thousand pounds of round hay bales that belonged to a contractor named Voss, a man who hauls hay and does odd trucking jobs for half the ranches in that end of the county and has a reputation for being direct in a way that doesn’t leave much room for smoothing things over.
Voss had rented the Ford diesel, the same one I’d chased that rough idle out of months before Rodney’s comment on the porch, for a two day hay run. Eleven miles out on a county road, in ninety four degree heat with the kind of humidity that makes the air feel like a wet towel, the engine started running hot, then rougher, then it died completely on the shoulder of the road with a trailer of hay behind it and a delivery deadline he was already behind on.
He got it towed back into Rodney’s gravel yard himself, arranged through a cousin with a flatbed, arriving right around the time the Saturday church potluck was letting out at the fellowship hall catty corner from the property. The smell of fried chicken and green beans was still hanging in the humid air. Half the deacons, the preacher, and a handful of the VFW color guard who’d stayed late to help fold up tables were still milling around close enough to hear everything that happened next.