The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
Phyllis Thorne lifted her head in her foils. Colleen Fry set the magazine in her lap.
“I expect Orville was wrong,” I said. “He usually wasn’t.”
That was all I said. I did not say Rick was a thief. I did not say anyone should call anyone. I said what Orville had written on the page, the way you would read the weather to a neighbor.
“Gladys,” Lynette said slowly. “Say that again. The part about the dates.”
I said it again. I said the date and Verlin’s name and I said $64.
Then the dryer in the corner clicked off.
The woman under it reached up and lifted the hood off her head, plastic cap and all, with her hair in pink rollers. I knew that face. I had gone to school with her older sister.
It was Dolores Ridgway. Verlin’s wife.
She came every Friday at nine-thirty for a wash and set. I knew that. I had simply not thought of it, any more than I had thought about the fact that a woman under a dryer hears every word and is taken for deaf.
“Say that part about the sensor again, Gladys,” Dolores said.
I said it a third time. Dolores listened the way a woman listens who has been married to a mechanic for fifty years and has heard every code and every excuse across a kitchen table.
“Seven sixteen,” she said, when I finished. “He has said that number in his sleep. Let me see the book.”
I got up out of the chair with the cape around my neck, and I walked across that little shop and put Orville’s notebook in her hands. She held it a long time before she looked at it. Then she read the circled page with her lips moving.
“That’s Orville’s hand,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Did you tell Rick you had this?”
“No. I didn’t know until last night.”
“Well.” She closed the notebook, gently, as you would close a hymnal. “Verlin has been sitting in my kitchen since April with nothing to read but the Farm Bureau paper. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to pay Lynette for half a set and I’m going to take this book home to him wet.”
“Dolores, please. I don’t want anyone saying Rick is a crook.”
“Nobody has said that.”
“I want somebody who knows cars to look at the old transmission. If he’s right, I’ll apologize with a pie.”
“I will tell him you said pie,” Dolores said.
Lynette put her arm around my shoulders. Phyllis Thorne, with foil all over her head like a woman being received by Mars, said her nephew had taken his pickup to Burkett’s in August. They told him his differential was gone. $1400. He drove it home and sold it for parts in September because he could not stand the thought of it, and his wife said it never did a thing wrong before or after.
“That one nobody can prove,” Phyllis said. “It’s in a yard in Enid in pieces.”
“Don’t make it a story,” I said.
You cannot ask a beauty shop not to talk. But I watched Phyllis nod, and Lynette squeeze my shoulder, and for the rest of the morning not one of them said Rick’s name in anything but a careful voice.