The Day the VFW Filled the Showroom

“Lorraine, it’s a civil matter,” Stan Kessler said.

He did not look up from his computer screen when he said it. He had a coffee mug at his elbow that read World’s Best Boss, and a Kessler Motors pen in his hand, and he clicked the pen twice the way a man does when he has decided a conversation is over.

“Soldiers sign a lot of paper before they ship out,” he went on. “Storage agreements, release forms. Ryan signed what Ryan signed. I’d hate for him to hear about this from a stranger, with him so far from home.”

I was sixty-eight years old that Monday. I had driven eleven miles in my late husband’s Mercury Grand Marquis with my purse on my lap, and I had not raised my voice since I walked in.

“Stan,” I said. “My grandson’s truck was parked in your pole barn on the first Sunday of September. I started it myself. On the first Sunday of October there was an oil stain on the concrete and nothing else. I would like to know where it is.”

“It’s been handled.”

“Handled how?”

He opened his top drawer, took out a check, and slid it across the desk with two fingers. It was made out to Ryan Tuttle for 500 dollars.

“Goodwill,” Stan said. “For his service. We really do support our troops here, Lorraine. Take that to him with my thanks.”

I looked at the check. I looked at the banner through the glass behind him, the long red, white and blue one he strung over the front of the lot every fall. Salute to Our Troops Sale, it said, in letters a foot tall, and underneath, in smaller print, military discount on every vehicle.

I did not take the check.

“Where is the truck, Stan?”

“Like I said. Handled.” He clicked the pen again. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a customer coming at ten.”

That was the day I learned what a man sounds like when he has decided you will not do anything about it. I did not do anything fast, and I did not do anything loud. I did one thing, and I did it with a lot of help.

My grandson is Ryan Tuttle. He is twenty-three, a Specialist in the Missouri Army National Guard, and a wheeled vehicle mechanic by trade, which means that since he was sixteen he has been the person at the Braddock co-op who can hear a bad bearing from across a parking lot. He is a quiet boy. He has his grandfather’s ears and his grandfather’s way of saying “Yes, ma’am” like it costs nothing.

I raised him more than anyone did, if I am honest. His mother moved to Arizona when he was nine, and his father, my son Todd, works two weeks on and one week off in the North Dakota oil fields. So Ryan spent his days in my kitchen and his evenings in the shop behind our house with my husband Wendell, who was a lineman for the rural electric co-op for twenty-nine years and could not stand to see a boy with idle hands.