The Transmission The Shop Sold Me

“Red,” he said. “Clear enough to read through. Smells like transmission fluid, not like burnt toast.” He took a magnet from his coat pocket and touched it to the bottom of the pan. It came up with a gray smudge on it. “That’s the normal fuzz. Any transmission that’s lived to a hundred and ninety thousand has that. If the clutches were slipping, I would be looking at a pan full of clutch material, and the fluid would be black. The filter is clean.”

“The valve body,” I said. “He said it was scored.”

“I can’t see the valve body without taking it apart.” Verlin looked at Rick. “Did you take it apart?”

“No, sir.”

“Then nobody knows it’s scored. And nothing in this pan says it is.”

He had Rick move the tarp. Then he pointed with his cane at a small black plastic part on the side of the case, a little thing, no bigger than my thumb, held in with one bolt.

“Take that out.”

Rick took it out. The o-ring was flat as a dime. The plastic body had a hairline crack running along the shoulder, and on the pins at the tip there was a line of green.

Verlin took a small meter out of his other pocket and touched the leads to the pins.

“That ought to read a couple hundred ohms,” he said. “It reads nothing at all.” He held it up for me to see. “That is your transmission, Gladys. That right there. Sixty-four dollars.”

Nobody spoke. I looked at the thing in Verlin’s ruined hand, and I thought of Orville circling a line in pencil.

“I pulled seven sixteen Wednesday morning,” Rick said.

He was still on his knees. He said it to the concrete.

“I knew what it was when I saw it. I didn’t talk myself into anything that morning. I knew.”

“Did you forget what I taught you?” Verlin asked.

“No, sir.”

“Then tell the lady why.”

Rick sat back on his heels. He wiped his hands on a rag, one finger at a time.

“I had a unit on the shelf,” he said. “A man ordered a remanufactured transmission for his Crown Victoria in August, and I ordered it, and when it came his engine had let go instead and he junked the car. The rebuilder only takes returns for thirty days. It was day forty. Fred Burkett does the books out of Enid. He said to me, move it or it comes out of your bonus.”

“Twenty-four hundred dollars,” Verlin said.

“Yes, sir. It sat in the back for seven weeks. Every Monday Fred asked about it.” He looked at me then. “Then your car came in on the hook. A good car, a hundred and ninety thousand miles, with a limp code. I told myself it was going to need one eventually.”

“Because I was the widow,” I said.

“Because you wouldn’t ask anybody.”

It was the truest thing anyone said all weekend, and he knew it as he said it.

I looked at that grown man on his knees in the rain, with a wrench still in his hand. I had come ready to be angry. I had even practiced a sentence in the car, a short, cold one. It was gone. What I felt was tired, and a little cold, and sorry for the whole county, myself included.