The Breakfast at the Next Rally

The five thousand dollars

I did not file a claim. I did not file on our insurance either, because our deductible was a thousand dollars and a claim on our policy would have meant explaining who hit us, which would have come back around to Oren just the same.

We towed the camper home to Bartow that Sunday, crease and all. The door still opened and the window still latched, so we were lucky. On Monday I took it to a body shop in Lakeland that does RV work, run by a heavy, quiet man named Spencer who has been fixing campers since the nineties.

Spencer looked at it for about ten minutes. He pressed on the side wall and listened. He pulled the trim back with a putty knife and looked at the framing behind it.

“Your framing’s fine,” he said. “The aluminum studs took a little bend, but nothing I can’t straighten. It’s the skin. That’s ribbed aluminum siding, and once it creases like that you can’t pound it flat like a truck fender. I’ll cut out the damaged section, set a new panel, seal it, and match the trim.”

“How much?”

He wrote it on the back of an estimate sheet. Parts, labor, sealant, new trim strip, the window seal. It came to five thousand and twelve dollars. He said he would take the twelve off if I paid in cash, and I laughed, because I did not have five thousand in cash and he knew it.

We had a savings account we had been building for two years, a little at a time out of my bus checks, for a newer truck for Eric.

I moved five thousand out of it that afternoon. I did not like doing it. I am not going to pretend I did not lie awake over it.

But I kept thinking about my grandpa in that ditch, and how close he came to hitting the Hendersons’ boy on his bike the week before, and how nobody in our family said a word until it was almost too late.

Spencer said three weeks. He had it done in four, which for an RV shop in Florida in the fall, when every snowbird in the state is bringing in their rig, is about as good as it gets.

When I picked it up, you could not see where the old panel stopped and the new one began.

“Who hit you?” Spencer asked me, as he handed me the keys.

“My father in law,” I said.

“He paying for it?”

“Not yet,” I said. He gave me a look, but he did not ask anything else.