The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
So I said, “All right, Rick.”
“Good,” he said. “Come get her Thursday afternoon.”
On Thursday I read most of the paper he put in front of me. I did not read the line near the bottom, in small print, that said all sales on installed parts were final. Nobody reads that line. That is why it is there.
I signed my name and wrote the check. Then Rick tapped my roof, and I drove home.
The car ran like a dream. It shifted so smooth I could not feel it. I told myself I had done the right thing for a woman my age.
I was wrong, but I did not know it yet.
That night I went out to clear the glove box.
The paperwork from Rick needed a place to live. I carried a dish towel out to the driveway and sat sideways on the bench seat with the door open and the dome light on.
I found a flashlight with dead batteries. Four packets of ketchup. A tire gauge. The owner’s manual, swollen from humidity until it would not close. A tin of the peppermints.
Under the manual was a green spiral notebook.
On the cover, in the square printing I would know anywhere, my husband had written the year and the name of the car.
I knew he kept records. A scale man cannot help it. But I had never once opened that glove box. It was his, and I had a rule about his things. I left them where he put them.
I took the notebook inside and sat down at the kitchen table with my coat still on.
Every oil change since 2015 was there. The date, the mileage, the cost, and a line about what the oil looked like on the dipstick. New wiper blades. A stone chip in the windshield with a small drawing of it, as if he planned to take it to court. It was written the way he wrote scale tickets, with nothing in it that did not need to be.
I turned a page and found an entry with a pencil circle around it. He circled the things he wanted found again.
3/14/22. 141,300. Limp on 74, will not shift, check engine on. Towed to Verlin. Code P0716, turbine shaft speed sensor, sits on the side of the case. $64 part, $45 labor, one hour. Ran fine after. Not the transmission. Verlin says if it ever does it again, read the code and do the sensor first.
I read it three times. Then I got up and found the invoice Rick had given me. It said Trans R&R, reman unit, $3200.00. It said nothing about a sensor at all.
The car had done the very same thing on Monday. The same light. The same refusal to shift. And a man who had been wrenching on cars since high school had looked at a computer and told me it was the transmission.
I sat very still.