The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
I did not know what a transmission was for, exactly. I knew it was expensive when it went.
On Tuesday morning I called Burkett Tire and Auto, because it was the closest shop and because Rick Hanlon was the manager. His mother, Lois, and I had sat in the same pew at First Methodist for as long as I could count. His father, Del, farmed a section east of town and hauled his wheat across Orville’s scale every June, and Rick used to ride the tailgate with his legs hanging off, eating the peppermints Orville kept in a tin for the drivers’ children.
Rick sent the wrecker himself. It was six blocks, and I could have crept it, but he said he would not hear of it. No charge. I thought that was kind.
He called Wednesday morning and asked if I could come down at noon.
I walked. It was a mild day, and Keeler is small enough that a woman can walk to most of what she needs, which is a thing you stop noticing until a car quits on you.
Rick was waiting at the open bay door with my car up on the lift behind him and a laptop open on the bench. He was thirty-six or thirty-seven, a big, easy man in a clean gray shirt with his name stitched over the pocket. He came and stood close to me and put one hand flat on the hood, the way you would steady a calf.
“It’s the transmission, Mrs. Wachter,” he said.
He said it kindly. That was the worst part.
“I hooked it up to the computer. It’s throwing transmission codes. The clutches are slipping and the valve body is scored. I can’t in good conscience tell you to drive it.”
“What would it take?” I asked.
“A remanufactured unit, installed, with a one-year warranty. $3200.”
I had $4100 in the savings account at the credit union. That was what Orville left for emergencies, and I had been calling it the roof money, because the roof over the back porch was going to need doing come spring.
“Could I think it over?”
“Sure you can,” Rick said. His voice was warm as a blanket. “I just hate to picture you out on that highway in it. I’d never forgive myself. Orville would come back and haunt me.”
I should say why I did not do what a sensible person would have done, which is call somebody else.
My son Hugh lives in Oklahoma City and drives a truck for a produce company. He would have gotten in the cab and driven ninety minutes and thrown those keys on Rick’s counter. I know my boy. He would have made it a fight, and a fight was not what I needed on Wednesday. I needed a car I could drive to church by Sunday.
The other man I might have called was Verlin Ridgway, who fixed Orville’s cars for most of our marriage and fished the Salt Fork with him every Fourth of July. But Verlin closed his garage on Mill Street in the spring. His hands went bad, the knuckles swollen like walnuts. I would not ask a man with hands like that to crawl under a car for me, and I would not ask his wife either.