The Dealer Who Made It Right

Building Her Back

I bought the motor home about eight months after I retired, a twenty year old Class C camper I found through a fellow at church, sitting behind his barn with a flat tire and a family of mice living in the cushions. My son thought I had lost my mind. Twelve thousand dollars for something that old, he said, when I could put that money toward a newer one on a payment plan.

I did not want a newer one. I wanted this one, because something about the shape of it, faded and stubborn and still standing after twenty years of Iowa winters, felt like the right vessel for a promise that old.

I spent the better part of three years on it. New tires and brakes the first summer. A rebuilt generator the second, after two cold mornings in a row where it would not turn over and I nearly gave up on the whole thing out of spite. Solar panels on the roof so I would not have to hunt for a hookup every night. A new mattress, because Theresa always said the mattress that came in these things was built for punishment, not sleep.

I hung her quilt across the bed, the one her mother made her as a wedding gift. I fit her old percolator coffee pot into the cabinet above the little sink, even though I bought a newer one for the house, because it belonged in there and nowhere else. I wired a small ceramic hummingbird she had kept on our windowsill above the dashboard, so she could ride along with me, in her way, the way I could not quite let her go in any other way.

And down at the base of the dinette bench, where the vinyl cushion lifted off for storage, I built a false floor. It was a small thing, done mostly out of habit, the same way a man who has spent his whole career thinking about water pressure and structural clearance cannot help but overbuild everything he touches. I framed a shallow compartment under there, deep enough for tools or a spare part or two, and I sealed it with a panel cut to match the floor so well that unless you knew to look for it, you would never know it was there.

I want to be honest with you. I do not remember putting anything in it. I built it the second winter, mostly as a project to keep my hands busy on the nights the house was too quiet, and once it was done I never gave it another thought. I certainly never told anyone it was there, including my own son, who had grown up watching me build things and never once cared to learn how.

Some evenings, after Theresa was gone, I would climb into the driver’s seat of that half finished motor home, in my own garage, going nowhere, and just sit there for an hour with my hands on the wheel. I would picture the Mississippi headwaters up in Minnesota. I would picture a little diner somewhere in Arkansas I had read about that still served pie the old way. I would picture, if I am honest, Theresa in the passenger seat, telling me I was driving too fast even though the truck was parked in a garage and going nowhere at all.

I was three days from finally leaving when my son sold it out from under me.