The Title With Her Name First

She was eighty-one and had been a fourth grade teacher for thirty-four years.

I fixed the heat pump. It was a fan motor and a bad capacitor. While I was writing up the ticket, she asked me if I knew anybody who needed a car.

Her husband had passed in the fall, and his car had sat in the garage since.

It was a 2013 Corolla. Silver. A hundred and twenty-six thousand miles, every oil change written in a little spiral notebook in the glove box in a man’s square handwriting.

She wanted six thousand five hundred for it.

“I could get more,” she said, “but I’d like to know where it’s going.”

I told her about Kaylee. I told her about the braces and the clarinet and the flashlight she used to sleep with. Mrs. Hendricks listened with her hands folded on her kitchen table, and when I finished she said, “Sixty-five hundred, and you bring that girl by to see me sometime.”

I took the money out of the credit union the next morning.

I was about six hundred dollars short of the full amount plus the usage tax, which in Kentucky is six percent of the price, so I worked three Saturdays of emergency calls to cover the rest.

Then I drove the car to the county clerk’s office with Mrs. Hendricks’s signed title on the seat beside me, and I stood at the counter and made the decision that this whole story turns on.

The clerk asked me how I wanted it titled. I said I wanted two names. She asked if I wanted “and” or “or” between them.

She explained that “and” means both people have to sign to sell it, and “or” means either one can.

I asked which name goes first.

“Whichever one you write first, honey,” she said. “It’s your paperwork.”

I wrote Kaylee’s. Kaylee Doyle or Austin Rademacher. I wanted her name first because it was her car, and I wanted mine on it only so that the insurance and the law would let a sixteen-year-old have it.

In two years, when she turned eighteen, I could sign off and it would be all hers.

The clerk smiled at the application and didn’t say anything. The registration came that day and the title came in the mail from Frankfort three weeks later.

I kept it in the envelope in my truck’s glove box under the warranty papers for the compressor I’d put in at the Baptist parsonage.

Crystal knew a car was coming. I told her in April, when I had to explain why I’d added a second vehicle to my insurance.

She’d said, “That’s a lot, Austin,” and gone quiet, and I took the quiet for a yes.