The Password on the Shop Door

What the job was

People hear bookkeeping and think it means a checkbook. A body shop with six employees is not a checkbook.

Every Monday morning I ran payroll for Ray, Jeff, Tony, Cody and the two part-time kids from the vocational program.

I submitted it by ten so the direct deposits hit at midnight Tuesday into Wednesday. In five years I never missed one.

Every quarter I filed the federal payroll return and the Indiana withholding. Every month I filed sales tax on the parts.

Every January I did the W-2s, and I mailed them myself from the post office in town so I knew they went out.

Then there were the insurance claims, which were most of my day.

An estimate goes to the adjuster, and then the car comes apart, and there is always more damage behind the bumper than anybody saw.

That is a supplement. You photograph the hidden damage, write it up line by line, send it, and then call, and call again, and argue politely over whether a bracket is repairable or has to be replaced.

I knew every adjuster in four counties by first name. I knew which ones answered before eight and which ones you had to catch after lunch.

A good supplement on a bad wreck can be a thousand dollars of the shop’s money, sometimes two.

I ordered parts. I chased the parts that did not come. I set up rental cars for customers.

I handled the parts vendors, the paint supplier, the shop’s insurance, the propane for the heaters, and the man who serviced the paint booth filters.

And every school morning at seven-thirty, I drove Tyler and Ethan to the elementary school, because my mother starts work at the high school office at seven-fifteen and Wayne opens the shop at seven.

Tuesdays and Thursdays I picked them up at three, too, because those were the days Ethan had reading help after school and the bus did not wait for him.

I loved those drives. I want to be honest about that. Nobody made me love them.

Tyler talked about baseball cards and Ethan asked questions about everything, like whether fish sleep and why the sky over the quarry looked purple.

In the fall, a bookkeeping service in Seymour quoted a shop down the road thirty dollars an hour for what I did.

I did the math once on a legal pad. Thirty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, was about forty-five thousand dollars.

I tore the page off and threw it away. Because here is the other half of the truth, and I would be lying if I left it out.

I lived in that basement for free. I ate their groceries. Wayne paid my phone bill and the insurance on my old pickup, about a hundred and forty dollars a month.

When my transmission went in the third year, he rebuilt it himself on a Sunday and never charged me for the parts.

So it was not nothing. I knew it was not nothing. For a long time I told myself it came out even.