The Application My Father In Law Kept
Josh stood there with his hands in his coat pockets. He is three years younger than Kelly, a tall, easy man that people like on sight, which is why he sells cars. He had sold them for his father since he was twenty-two.
“Got a minute?” he said.
“I’ve got five quarts’ worth.”
He watched me spin the filter on.
“Is the city hiring?” he said.
I set the wrench down.
“Streets had a posting before Christmas. Why?”
“What’s it start at?”
“About twenty-one an hour, if you’ve got the license. They’ll help you get the license if you don’t.”
He did the arithmetic. I could see him doing it.
“That’s more than I made last year,” he said.
I did not say anything. There are times a man needs room and not an answer.
“Thirty-one thousand,” Josh said. “That’s what I cleared. And I’m his best man, Dan. I’m his only full-time man. I sold more cars off that lot than anybody, and I made thirty-one thousand dollars, and Amy’s cleaning at the clinic three nights a week so we can keep the van.”
“I sat there at Thanksgiving and watched you write that number down,” he said. “I make less than half of it. And he was offering you my job.”
“He didn’t know.”
“He knows what he pays me.” Josh took one hand out of his pocket and rubbed his face. “He owes me twenty-one hundred in commissions from the fall. Says it’s coming. It’s been coming since October.”
“Josh, what’s going on down there?”
So he told me.
A used car lot does not own most of its cars. I had not known that. A finance company fronts the money to buy them at auction, and the lot pays interest on every car for every day it sits. That is called the floor plan. When a car has sat too long, the finance company wants a piece of its money back whether the car has sold or not.
Walt had bought heavy in the summer, when rates were up and he was sure trucks would move. They did not move. He had eleven units that had been sitting since August. He had been paying the floor plan out of the money that should have gone to Josh, and then out of his own salary, and then, Josh thought, out of something else.
“I think he borrowed on the building,” Josh said. “I don’t think Mom knows.”
“How long does he have?”
“End of the month, they come and count. If he’s short, they pull the line and send trucks for the inventory. That’s forty-one years, Dan. Gone on a Tuesday.”
“You want me to ask about the streets job?” I said.
“I want to know if you’d think less of me for leaving him.”
“No,” I said. “I’d think you had a wife and a boy.”
He nodded for a while. He stayed and held the funnel while I poured the oil.
Walt would not talk to him. I heard that later. Josh went in Monday and asked to see the books, and Walt told him the books were not a salesman’s concern.
The storm came the third week of January.
It started Sunday after church, fine and sideways, and by dark you could not see the streetlight from our front window. Eleven inches by Monday noon, with a wind out of the northwest that put a four-foot drift across every east-west street in town.