The First New Car of Her Life
He was standing on the sidewalk out front when we turned onto his block. Hands in the pockets of a nice wool coat.
Looking down the street for Mom’s oatmeal Buick, I suppose. He didn’t even glance at the little blue SUV coming toward him.
Mom slowed down as we passed him. She reached over with her left hand, very deliberately, and she tapped the horn.
Twice. Two short, polite little honks, the way you’d honk at a neighbor out getting the mail.
Shane looked up, irritated, the way people in the city look at anybody who honks. Then he saw her face through the windshield.
I watched it go across his own face, all of it, one thing after another, like weather.
Mom found a spot at a fire hydrant, which she would never in her life have done in our town, and pulled to the curb, and put her flashers on, and rolled her window down.
Shane walked over slowly. He looked at the car. He looked at her.
He looked at me in the passenger seat and I didn’t say anything, and he looked back at the car again, at the paint, standing there on the curb with his mouth a little open.
He bent down to the window.
“Mom,” he said. “Whose car is this?”
“Mine,” she said.
“Since when?”
“Since two weeks ago.”
He straightened up and put his hand on the roof, and I watched him do the math.
I watched him think about the phone call and the fifteen hundred and I didn’t have it, honey, I spent it. I saw his jaw work.
“You bought a car,” he said. “With the scooter money.”
“Part of the down payment,” Mom said. “Yes.”
For a second he looked like he might really get angry. He looked like the twelve-year-old who didn’t get the dirt bike.
He opened his mouth, and I braced, and I’ll admit I was half ready to get out of that car.
Then he looked at the paint again, the deep blue going bright where the sun came through the trees, and something happened to his face that I hadn’t seen since the parking lot behind the funeral home.
“That’s Dad’s color,” he said. His voice cracked right down the middle. “That’s the truck. That’s the color of Dad’s truck.”
“It is,” Mom said.
He stood there on the sidewalk with his hand on her roof and he started to cry. Not loud. My brother never did anything loud.
He just stood there in his nice coat with tears running down, and people walked around him on the sidewalk and didn’t look.
“You never got a new one,” he said. “Not once, Mom. Not one time. And I’ve been calling you every month like you were an ATM.”
“I gave it to you,” Mom said. “Every dollar. Nobody made me.”
“I know you did,” he said. “That’s what’s so awful about it.”
We had lunch at a diner around the corner, a little place with a counter and red stools and a waitress who called everybody hon, which made Mom feel right at home. Shane ordered a patty melt and didn’t eat it.
He told us all of it then, with his elbows on the table. The BMW lease was more than he could carry.
His company had changed the commission plan in the spring, and his checks had shrunk by almost a third, and he’d already signed for the car by then and was too proud to back out.