The Car Keys in the Parking Lot

I could also have driven over there myself with my title and taken it back. That was the easy thing. Half the women I know would have done it by Tuesday night, and I would not have blamed one of them.

But I kept thinking about Brittany at the cheese plant.

She worked the five a.m. shift on the packaging line in Wisconsin Rapids. Her apartment was across town from the plant. There is no bus that runs at four-thirty in the morning in Wisconsin Rapids, and there is no walking two miles at eighteen below.

If I took that car back, she would lose that job inside a week. She was twenty-three years old. She had done nothing but cry on the phone to her father.

I did not want to be the woman who left her on foot in January.

“Then what are you going to do?” Jake asked. “Drive Grandpa’s truck until it kills you?”

“No,” I said. I got up and got my checkbook register out of the drawer by the phone. “I’m going to buy her a car.”

Jake stared at me. “You’re going to what?”

“Not a nice one,” I said. “Something that runs. Something that starts at five in the morning.”

“With what money?”

That was a fair question. I had four thousand one hundred dollars in savings. It was my furnace fund, my emergency money, my if-something-happens money. It had taken me six years to save it, a little at a time.

“With mine,” I said.

Jake sat down across from me. He took his coat off finally and hung it on the back of the chair.

“Mom,” he said. “That’s not fair to you.”

“I know,” I said. “But it’s fair to her. And it gets me my car back by Saturday instead of by spring.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he pulled out his phone.

“What’s the budget?” he said.

We looked for two days. Jake knows cars the way his grandfather knew cattle, and he would not let me look at anything with a check engine light, a salvage title, or a seller who said “it just needs a little work.”

Greg knew something was going on. He saw us at the kitchen table with the laptop open and Jake’s notebook full of mileage figures. He asked once, and I said we were looking at cars, and he said “for who,” and I said “for the family,” and he went out to the shed.

I want to be fair to Greg here. He was not a cruel man. He was a proud one, and a scared one, and that week he was mostly quiet. He started the truck for me every morning at five-thirty so it would be warm, or as warm as it got.

He did not offer to switch with me, though. His pickup had four-wheel drive and a heater that worked. He drove it to the feed mill every day, and I drove his father’s truck to Walt’s and the Halvorsens’ and out the long lane to the Lindquist place.

I noticed that. I did not say anything. I just noticed it.

On Thursday night Jake found it. A 1999 Nissan Sentra, dark blue, one hundred ninety-eight thousand miles, listed by an older man outside Plover. The ad said “Wife’s car. Always garaged. Oil changed every 3,000. Asking $3,200.”