The Car Keys in the Parking Lot

“Sentras run forever if you change the oil,” Jake said. “That one’s barely broken in.”

We drove out Friday after his last class. I drove the farm truck, and Jake rode with me because his car was at the tire shop getting a wheel bearing done. The heater did its best. We both kept our gloves on.

The man’s name was Dale Brekke. He was seventy-eight, a retired dairy farmer, tall and stooped, with a seed corn cap and hands like oven mitts. He had the Sentra out in front of his machine shed with the engine already running.

“Figured you’d want to hear it cold-started,” he said. “So I started it cold. Then I let it run.”

Jake liked him right away.

Jake went over that car like a doctor. He checked the oil and the transmission fluid. He looked at the belts and the hoses and lay down on a piece of cardboard in the snow to look underneath.

“Some rust on the rocker panels,” he said when he came out. “Nothing structural. Frame’s good. Tires have another winter in them. Brakes are fine. Battery’s newer.”

“Put that battery in at Thanksgiving,” Dale said. “Marlys hated waiting on a car to start.”

He said his wife’s name the way you set down something breakable.

“How long ago did you lose her?” I asked.

“October,” he said. “Eleven weeks Sunday.” He looked at the car. “She drove it to church and the Piggly Wiggly and her sister’s in Stevens Point. That was about the whole route for twenty-six years.”

I told him I was a home health aide. He asked who I worked for, and when I told him, he nodded slowly.

“They had a girl come out for Marlys at the end,” he said. “Jenny something. Came twice a day. I never did thank her right.”

“I know Jenny,” I said. “I’ll tell her.”

He nodded again. Then he asked who the car was for. Jake looked at me, and I decided to tell the truth, because Dale seemed like a man who would know if I did not.

So I told him. My stepdaughter, her dead car, my husband, my Equinox, the cheese plant at five in the morning, the farm truck sitting in his driveway with the heater blowing lukewarm.

Dale listened with his hands in his coat pockets. When I finished, he walked once around the Sentra. He put his hand flat on the roof for a second.

“Twenty-eight hundred,” he said.

“You’re asking thirty-two,” I said.

“I know what I’m asking,” he said. “Marlys would have liked this. Her own stepmother was a hard woman. Marlys always said if she ever had the chance to be a better one, she’d take it.” He took his hand off the roof. “Twenty-eight hundred, and you take good care of that girl.”

I paid him in cash I had pulled from the credit union that afternoon: twenty-eight hundred-dollar bills in a white envelope. At his kitchen table he signed the title as seller and, when I asked him to, printed Brittany’s full name on the buyer’s line. Then he wrote out a bill of sale on a page from a feed store notepad.