The Grand Marquis Across the Highway

The Deal

“I’m not trying to get back at him,” I said. I needed somebody to hear me say it, even a stranger. “I just need to get home before dark, and I need a car that’s mine, and I need to stop asking people for rides.”

“I know it,” Merle said.

“The money was for her braces,” I said. “If I spend it on a car, I’m doing the same thing he wanted to do. Spending her money.”

Bev answered that before Merle could. “Honey, you’re spending it on the thing that drives her to the orthodontist,” she said. “There’s a difference. And you’ll find the down payment. Mothers always find it.”

Merle took off his hat and turned it in his hands. His hair was thin and very white. He looked at the car, and then at me.

“Nineteen hundred down,” he said. “The other five hundred you pay me twenty dollars a month till it’s gone. No interest. That’s how we did it on this lot before anybody had a credit score. Cash or check for the nineteen?”

“Twenty dollars a month,” I said. “For twenty-five months.”

“I can count,” Merle said, and Bev laughed.

“Check,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know that’s a lot to take from somebody you just met.”

“I’ve been taking checks off people’s faces for fifty-one years on this lot,” he said. “Been burned three times.”

He nodded at the check in my hand. “Your bank clears it Tuesday, I sign the title over to you with me on it as the lienholder, same as a bank would, and I mail it to you.”

He pointed at the back window. “You’ll have a temporary tag in your back window today. That’s thirty days to get it to the license office and pay your sales tax. Don’t wait till day twenty-nine. They get cranky.”

I laughed for the first time that day. It came out wet.

I wrote the check on the hood of that Marquis with Merle’s pen. Nineteen hundred dollars even. Under Memo, I started to write Kaylee and then stopped and wrote Car.

Merle took it, folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket, and then he held out his hand to me. His hand was big and dry and strong, a farmer’s hand under an old man’s skin.

I shook it right there on the gravel in front of that clean champagne car, under a gray October sky, with the gas station sitting across the road like it was waiting to see what I would do next.

“You’ve got insurance on the old car?” he asked.

“Our policy’s on Jesse’s truck and my old Malibu,” I said. “The Malibu’s been sitting dead in the yard since June.”

“Call your agent,” he said. “Have her move it over. You can’t pull out of here without it.”

My agent is a woman named Kim Barnes, and she answers her cell on Saturdays because that is the kind of town we live in.

I stood beside the car and read her the vehicle number off the little plate at the bottom of the windshield, and she moved the coverage over from the dead Malibu while I waited.

She emailed me the card and said, “Amber, are you okay? You sound funny.” I said I was fine. I said I bought a car. She said, “Well, good for you,” and did not ask anything else.