The Buick We Brought Our Boy Home In
The Promise
To understand why two thousand dollars felt like a punch, you have to know where we started from.
Jen and I had been saving since the month we found out. Every spare dollar went into a coffee can first, then into a credit union account once the can got heavy.
That is how our folks taught us. Save slow, pay cash, owe no man.
By October we had a little over fifteen thousand put by. Not a fortune. For two people like us, it was close to everything.
We live in a grain-elevator town in east-central Illinois. One stoplight, a Casey’s, a feed store, a water tower with the high school mascot painted on the side.
I weigh trucks and run the dump pit at the co-op. Jen packs line at the food plant twenty miles up the county road, over near Rantoul.
Good work. Honest work. But nobody out here is getting rich on it, and nobody expects to.
Our car was a 2006 Cobalt with a check-engine light that never went off. The heater only blew warm if you smacked the dash right over the vents.
Fine for me. Not fine for a woman eight months along driving a dark county road at five in the morning in January.
Kyle had the RAV4. A 2016, clean, one owner, him. He was trading up to a new truck and he offered it to us at what he swore was family price.
Fourteen five. We shook on it in his kitchen in October, his wife standing right there drying a plate.
“Just gotta get the new truck in first,” he said. “Couple weeks. Then she’s yours, little brother.”
Couple weeks turned into Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving turned into Christmas.
Every time I asked, he had a reason ready. The dealer was slow. His truck was on a hauler somewhere in Texas. He had to get the RAV4 detailed first.
Always one more thing. Always soon.
Meanwhile Jen stood at the end of our gravel lane in the dark every workday. Big as a barn, waiting on Donna from two roads over to swing by and carry her to the plant.
Donna is a saint. But she ran a different shift half the time.
On those mornings Jen drove the Cobalt herself, and I did not sleep until she texted me she was parked safe in the lot.
I kept not pushing Kyle because he was my brother. Because the money was sitting right there. Because you trust family.
That was my mistake, and I own it.
The Math
The night he raised the price, I sat at our kitchen table and did the math out loud. I wanted Jen to hear it straight, no sugar on it.
We had fifteen thousand and change. The RAV4 was now sixteen five.
Even if I wanted to swallow the insult and pay it, we did not have it. The only way to get there was a loan.
I had already priced the used lots at the two dealers in the county seat. With a baby coming and our credit stretched from the hospital deposit, the payment on anything decent ran close to three hundred a month.
Three hundred a month is a tank of propane and half the grocery bill. We did not have three hundred a month to give anybody.
Jen asked if we should just report him. Go to our folks. Make a thing of it.
I understood why she said it. She was tired and scared and about to have a baby.