The First New Car of Her Life
Mom walked up to it and put her hand flat on the hood. She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Roger looked at me, and I shook my head a little, and he understood and waited.
“Your dad’s truck was this color,” Mom said.
It was. Not exactly, I suppose. Paint changes. But close enough that I could see it parked by the machine shed with Dad’s cap on the dash and his thermos rolling around on the passenger floor.
“That’s the one,” Mom said. “That’s my car.”
“Do you want to drive it first?” Roger asked. “You should drive it first.”
She drove it first. She took it out past the grain elevator and onto the county road and back, Roger in the passenger seat and me in the back like a kid, and she didn’t go one mile over the speed limit, and she used her turn signal into the dealership even though nobody was behind us.
“It doesn’t shake,” she said when she parked it. She sounded amazed. “Stacy, it doesn’t shake at all.”
Roger’s desk was in a glass cubicle with a little dish of butterscotch candies and a picture of a grandbaby in a pumpkin costume.
He ran the numbers with a calculator first, out loud, before he ever touched the computer.
The sticker on the little SUV was just over thirty thousand. There was a rebate that month.
And the Buick, transmission and all, was worth something to them, because they would fix it and sell it on to somebody who knew a man.
“Eight hundred for the Buick,” Roger said. “I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Duffy, it’s not worth much more than that with the transmission gone. I’m not going to tell you different.”
“Dale would have gotten nine,” Mom said.
Roger smiled. “Dale would have gotten nine,” he agreed, and typed in nine hundred.
With the rebate and the trade, it came to about twenty-eight thousand dollars out the door, tax and title and license fees and all.
Roger printed it out so she could see every line. Mom read every line. She asked what the documentary fee was, and he told her.
“How much are you wanting to put down?” Roger asked.
Mom opened her purse and took out her checkbook, the same one that had been lying open on her kitchen table all year.
She uncapped her pen. Then she wrote a check and slid it across the desk to him.
It was for fifteen hundred dollars.
“That was the scooter,” she said to me, not to him. She said it very matter of fact. Roger looked at me with his eyebrows up, and I just shook my head, and he was kind enough not to ask.
Then she wrote a second check, from her savings, for thirty-four hundred more. Almost five thousand down altogether. She had thought about this.
She had sat up at night at that kitchen table with a pencil, I could tell, the way she used to do the farm books.
“I can finance the rest for you,” Roger said. “With that much down and your credit, I can get you somewhere around six percent for sixty months. You’d be looking at about four hundred and forty a month.”
Mom nodded slowly. “I’ve been sending more than that to Chicago most months this year,” she said. “I can do four forty.”