The Wheelchair They Took Away

I had not wanted to come in a convoy, and Bud had said that was fine, nobody was going to honk. So nine pickups parked inside the lines in front of the Dollar General, one after another, and six men stayed behind the wheel with their windows down and their work shirts on. A young woman with a lanyard unlocked the store’s front door from the inside and looked at the lot, and then at Glenn, and then she unlocked it more slowly.

Glenn went first. He drove the old chair over the threshold himself, pulling left, with the joystick under his right hand, and Bud and Garth and Greg came in behind him and stopped just inside the door with their hands in their pockets. They did not spread out along the wall. They did not say a word.

The store smelled of new carpet and floor wax. Along one wall sat a row of recliners still in plastic, and a row of televisions turned to the same game show with the sound off. A framed poster behind the counter said how easy they made it to say yes.

A man came out from behind a partition with a coffee mug. He was young, thirty or so, in a short-sleeved shirt and a name tag, with the stiff walk of a man who has not slept enough. He stopped in the middle of the floor and looked at the chair, and at the three men, and at me.

I knew him by his voice before he spoke.

“Mr. Pickett,” he said. “Mrs. Pickett. I think maybe we got off on the wrong foot.”

“Good morning, son,” said Glenn.

He rolled up to the counter. He set both hands on it, the left one curled, the right one flat. He looked at the young man’s face for a long moment, not unkindly, the way he used to look at a customer who was about to find out what a repair was going to cost.

“Mr. Yarrow, I would like you to open my file and add up what my wife has paid you, out loud, and then tell me what that chair would sell for used.”

Nobody moved.

I will tell you that I had expected something larger. I had lain awake on Sunday night turning over the speech I thought he would make, the one about his thirty years and his name. He made none of it. He asked a man to do arithmetic.

Bruce Yarrow looked at him. Then he looked at Bud, who had taken off his cap and was holding it in front of him, and who looked back with no expression at all. Then he set down his mug, and went to the file drawer under the counter, and brought out a folder, and opened it.

The store still kept an adding machine, the old kind with a roll of paper tape. He pulled it over. I watched him punch the numbers in with one finger, the way a man does when he does not trust the screen on his phone, and the tape came curling out onto the counter.

“Sixty-one payments,” he said. His voice was flat. “Forty dollars. That’s $2,440.”

“And the chair?”

He turned a page. “A used unit of that model retails for $1,780.”

“How many payments is that?”

Bruce did not answer right away. I think he was doing it in his head, and I think he had already done it, once, on Tuesday, and put it away. “Forty-five,” he said. “You passed it in June.”