The First New Car of Her Life
The combines were still running in the bean field across the road from our place, their headlights sweeping the rows, and I could see Tom’s in the middle of it, crawling along like a lit-up house.
My husband farms eight hundred acres with his cousin, corn and beans, and in October I don’t see much of him except the top of his cap going out the door before daylight.
I texted him from the driveway. He called me from the cab twenty minutes later.
“She wants to buy a car,” I said.
“Good,” Tom said. I could hear the machine humming around him. “Jim says that Buick’s done. What’s the problem?”
“Shane asked her for fifteen hundred more tonight. For a scooter.”
There was a long quiet on the line. Tom is a patient man, but he and Shane have never had much to say to each other.
Tom has never asked anybody for a dime in his life, and he doesn’t understand men who do.
“You want me to call him?” he said finally.
“No. She asked me not to. She asked both of us not to, really. She wants to handle it herself, and I think she’s right. If I call him, it turns into him and me, and it was never about him and me.”
“Then take her Saturday,” he said. “I’ll be in the field all day anyhow. If she needs help with the down payment, tell her we’ve got it.” Then, after a second, “She won’t take it, will she.”
“No,” I said. “She won’t.”
Our daughter Kaylee was still up when I came in, doing her math at the kitchen counter with one of her 4-H rabbits asleep in a laundry basket at her feet, which is against the rules of our house and which I let go.
“Is Grandma okay?” she asked. Kids hear everything. She’d heard me on the phone in the driveway with the window cracked.
“Grandma’s going to buy a car on Saturday,” I told her.
Kaylee is eleven. She thought about it seriously, the way she thinks about everything. “Can it be a color?” she said. “Grandma’s Buick is the color of oatmeal.”
Saturday came up bright and clear, one of those October mornings in central Illinois where the sky looks scrubbed and the elevator in town has trucks lined up out to the highway waiting to dump.
I picked Mom up at eight. She was waiting on the porch with her purse on her arm, wearing her red quilted jacket, the good one she wears to funerals and the Christmas Eve service.
She had put on lipstick. My mother does not wear lipstick to the grocery store.
“You look nice,” I said.
“I’m buying a car,” she said, like that explained it, and maybe it did.
We took the Buick because she wanted to trade it in. I drove.
Every time it shifted it gave this deep shudder, like an old dog shaking off water, and by the time we got onto the highway Mom was holding the door handle.
“Your dad would have fixed this,” she said, staring out at the bean stubble going by. “He’d have had it apart in the barn by now and back together with two bolts left over and it would have run another ten years.”
“He would have,” I said.