The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
“I want my money,” I said. “All of it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I want the next woman who comes through that door told what you’d want a stranger to tell your mother.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He stood. His knees were soaked through. He went in without another word and tore a check out of the shop’s book on the counter, with Colt standing very still by the tire machine, and wrote it for $3200. On the memo line, in block letters, he wrote Sensor, not transmission. Refund. He signed it with his own name and held it out to me in both hands.
“You keep the unit that’s in the car,” he said. “It’s a good one. It’s got the warranty. The shop will honor it as long as you drive it. I’ll answer to Fred for the rest.”
“I’m going to pay you for the sensor,” I said.
Rick blinked. “Ma’am?”
“That’s what the work would have cost. $64 and an hour at Verlin’s old rate, $45.” I counted it out of my purse onto his counter. “A hundred and nine. I won’t have it said I took something that wasn’t mine.”
“Mrs. Wachter, I can’t.”
“You can,” I said, “or I’ll hold the check.”
He took it. He looked at the bills in his palm like a man who has been handed a live coal. I let him stand there with it.
Word gets around in Keeler, and by Saturday noon it had gotten all the way around and come back changed.
I do not know who said what. I know Dolores Ridgway went to the diner at eleven and did not sit down. I know Phyllis Thorne was on the phone before she got her foils out. I know two farmers who had Monday appointments moved them to a shop in Arvilla, and a third called Burkett’s just to ask what a brake job would cost and then hung up when they told him.
Nobody threw a brick. Nobody wrote on the sign. The town, which had been trusting without asking, simply started to ask.
That evening Hugh called from a truck stop in Amarillo, because Colleen Fry’s daughter had put it on the computer, and I told him the whole thing slow.
“Mom,” he said. “You should have called me.”
“I know.”
“I’d have been in the shop in two hours.”
“You would have been right,” I said. “And I would not have had a car on Sunday.”
He was quiet. I could hear the diesels idling behind him.
“Well,” he said. “Did you at least keep the transmission?”
“It’s a good one.”
“Good,” Hugh said. “Put it on the roof money.”
I went to church on Sunday with a pain in my stomach. Pastor Evans preached on honest weights and measures, which I am sure he had planned a month before, and no one in that church looked at anyone else.
Lois Hanlon sat in the pew behind me. She wore a navy dress, with her hair set, and her face was closed like a door. At the passing of the peace I turned around, the way I always did, and held out my hand.