The Car Keys in the Parking Lot
I made the last payment in May of 2022. I married Greg in June. I remember standing at the credit union counter with the paid-off title in my hand and thinking, this is the first thing I have ever owned free and clear in my whole life.
The title was in the fireproof box in our closet. My name was the only name on it.
“Where are the keys?” I asked.
“She’s got both sets,” Greg said. “I gave her the spare, too, in case she locked herself out.”
I set my bag down on the floor. I did not throw it. I just set it down.
“And I’m supposed to drive your dad’s truck,” I said.
“It runs,” he said. “I’ll put the battery charger on it tonight.”
His father’s truck was a 1996 Ford with two-wheel drive, a bench seat, and a heater that blew lukewarm on its best day. It had sat in the machine shed since deer season. Greg used it to haul firewood.
I drive about seventy miles a day. My clients live out on county roads and at the ends of long farm lanes. Half of them have no one else coming. If I am late, a woman sits in a wet bed, or a man misses his insulin.
The forecast said eighteen below by Wednesday morning.
“Did Brittany ask you for my car?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No, she didn’t ask for anything. Her mom wouldn’t help her, and she was crying on the phone, and I just…” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I panicked, Sheila. I didn’t have thirty-four hundred dollars, and I couldn’t stand hearing her like that.”
“So you called me,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“You didn’t call me,” I said. “I had my phone the whole time. I was sitting in Mrs. Lindquist’s kitchen doing crossword puzzles. You could have called me.”
“I knew what you’d say.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
That was the whole fight. I did not raise my voice. My mother used to say that a woman who yells has already lost the argument, and I had lived long enough to think she was mostly right.
I went upstairs, ran a bath, and sat in it until the water went cold.
Wednesday morning the thermometer outside the kitchen window read eighteen below. I was out in the machine shed at a quarter to six with a flashlight in my teeth, plugging in a block heater on a truck older than my son.
Greg had put the charger on it the night before, like he said he would. He had also left a note on the counter: “Truck should start. Let it warm up 10 min. Sorry.” I folded it in half and put it in my coat pocket.
The truck started on the third try. The heater blew air that smelled like dust and mouse nests, and it never got past lukewarm. I scraped the inside of the windshield with my credit union card.
My first client was Walt Pederson, eighty-three, a retired milk hauler with congestive heart failure who lived eleven miles out on County Road J. I give him his pills, check his ankles for swelling, and make sure he eats something besides crackers.