The Wheelchair They Took Away

I was going to call back and ask nicely. I will admit it. I had the whole speech put together: how long we had been customers, how I would pay anything.

“Jackie,” Glenn said.

I looked up. He was sitting very straight. His face was the face he used to wear when he stood at a customer’s open hood with a flashlight and knew, without anybody telling him, which part had gone bad.

“Don’t you beg that man.”

“Glenn, I am only going to ask.”

“I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to call him back and be nice, and he is going to be nice back and say it’s policy. I heard it from here.” He tipped his head toward the phone. “He’s not a bad man. He’s a man with a number. You can’t beg a number.”

“Then who do I call?”

He was quiet. Out the kitchen window a pair of mourning doves were walking along the top rail of the fence.

“Call Bud,” my husband said.

“Bud Gentry is sixty-six years old.”

“Call Bud.”

So I did.

Bud ran the service department at Overton Motors for thirty-three years. He hired Glenn when Glenn was twenty-two and had never touched anything newer than a 1978 Chevy truck. He stood up at our wedding. He retired three years ago, and now he spends his days fixing the mowers of widows and not charging them.

He picked up on the second ring, and I told him in four sentences. Two men. The chair. Policy. The kitchen.

There was a long pause. I could hear a radio in the background, a ball game, and then I heard it go quiet as he reached over and turned it off.

“What time?” Bud said.

“Bud, I didn’t call to ask for anything.”

“I didn’t ask what you wanted,” he said. “I asked what time.”

I did not know what to say, so I said I did not know what time.

“Then I’ll tell you,” said Bud. “Saturday. Seven in the morning. I’ll make some calls. You put the coffee on.”

I called Garth Tibbets next, who worked in the bay beside Glenn’s for twenty-one years and works Glenn’s old bay now. Then Don Ebersole, who drives a school bus these days. Then Greg Fielder, the youngest of them. Glenn trained Greg when he was nineteen years old and could not tell a ratchet from a crescent wrench, and Greg cried at the retirement dinner in front of his wife.

Then Tony Griffin, Wayne Hoffman, Ed Mahler, Leroy Sutter, Ken Fahey. I went down the back page of Glenn’s old address book, the one with the ink gone brown, and called nine men in all.

Not one of them asked me what I needed. Every one of them said the same two words, and Garth asked which store.

Greg said it twice. Then he said, “Is Glenn eating?” and “I’m coming tonight,” and I said Saturday was fine, and he said, “Okay. But I’m bringing the good coffee.”

It was almost dark when I hung up the last time. Glenn watched me from the kitchen chair, the address book open on the counter.

“All nine,” I said.

“I only called Bud, you know. In my head.” He looked at his hands. “I didn’t know it was going to be all of them.”