The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
I am not a quick woman. I do not leap to conclusions and I do not leap to the phone. I thought about what I had in my hand: a notebook, a paper I had signed, a part already bolted into the car. I thought about Rick standing in the bay door with his hand on my hood.
I did not call the shop. I did not call the sheriff’s office, because I knew what a deputy would say to a woman who signed a paper and drove away in a running car. I did not call Hugh, because I knew what Hugh would say.
I went to bed. In the morning I put the notebook in my purse and went to get my hair done.
I have had a standing appointment at Lynette Nowak’s shop every Friday at ten o’clock since 1986. It is called the Cut and Curl, and it sits between the hardware store and the old bank building on Main Street. It has four chairs, two dryers, and the best information network in three counties.
I had never in my life started a thing at that shop. I was always the one who listened.
That Friday I walked in at ten sharp, and the bell on the door rang, and the smell hit me, hairspray and permanent solution, the same as it has been for forty years. Lynette was at her first chair with a comb in her hand. Phyllis Thorne sat in the second chair with her hair in foils. Colleen Fry sat by the window flipping a magazine. In the back corner, under the far dryer, a woman sat in a plastic cap with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her purse.
I did not look at her closely. I did not look at much of anything that morning.
“Gladys, there you are,” Lynette said. “Sit. You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“I was up a good part of it.”
“The car trouble? Colleen said you were creeping down Seventy-Four on Monday like a funeral.”
“I was.” I sat in the chair. I let her put the cape around me. “I had it at Burkett’s.”
“Oh, honey. Rick Hanlon’s a good boy. What’d he say?”
I had thought all the way down Main Street about what I would say. I had decided not to accuse anyone of anything. I did not want a scene. I only wanted something said out loud in a room where it would be heard.
So I reached into my purse and took out the green notebook and set it in my lap.
“Rick told me I needed a transmission,” I said. “A new one. $3200. I paid him yesterday.”
Lynette’s comb stopped.
“Orville kept a record of that car,” I said. “In March of 2022 it did the very same thing. The same light, the same stuck gear. Verlin Ridgway looked at it. Orville wrote it down. It was a sensor. A $64 part.”
Nobody said a word.
I will tell you what a silence sounds like in a beauty shop. It sounds like the blow dryer at the next station going off, because the girl working it has quit to listen. It sounds like a magazine page not turning.