The Call I Made to My Brother First

So when Dad was confused and could not decide for himself, the surgeon in Lexington would talk to Bert. If I was in the room, I could talk. If I was not in the room, it did not matter what I thought.

Bert knew that. I knew that. That was the whole reason for the tires.

I stood there in that lot at a quarter to eight in the morning and went down the list in my head like I was troubleshooting a hydraulic leak.

Otis, my husband, is a lineman for the power company. He was three hundred miles away on a storm crew in Virginia, restoring lines after a bad wind, and he had been on a pole since before dark.

I have one spare tire and two flats. I had a jack, a lug wrench and a quart of oil in the trunk. I did not have a valve core and I did not have a compressor.

There is no ride to call around Morehead at a quarter to eight on a Saturday. There is no cab. The nearest place that would even have air was a mile away, and a mile on two flat tires would have ruined both of them.

I thought about calling the sheriff. I did think about it. But no deputy on earth was going to drive me sixty-five miles to Lexington by eight thirty, and I was not going to sit in that lot giving a report on my own brother while Dad’s consult went on without me.

So I called Percy Fultz.

Percy runs the tow service out on the bypass. He is the one who answers the county’s calls at night, and he has hauled half our road department’s equipment at one time or another. He picked up on the fourth ring, sounding like gravel.

“Greta Hensley,” he said. “It’s barely light out.”

“I know it. I’m at the hospital. Two flats, back, cores pulled. I need to be in Lexington by eight thirty.”

“Give me twenty minutes,” he said. He was there in nineteen. He backed the flatbed up to my front bumper with the beeper going, and a security guard came over to watch like men always do around a tow truck.

He squatted by the tire and looked at the empty stem. “Somebody did you on purpose,” he said.

“Somebody did.”

He did not ask who. I will always be grateful to him for that.

“I’ve got air,” he said. “I don’t carry cores. Folks lose a cap, they don’t lose the whole core. I could run you to the tire shop on Main when they open at eight and you’d be rolling by eight thirty.”

“That puts me in Lexington near ten.”

“It does.” He rubbed his jaw. “Or I put her on the bed and haul you and the car both to Lexington, drop the car at a tire place there, drop you at the door. That’s a long haul on a Saturday this early. Call it six hundred dollars.”

I fix county trucks for a living. I know what a hook-up fee is, and I know what a flatbed gets per mile, and I knew he was not padding it. It was fair. It was also most of what Otis and I had put back for Christmas.

“Go,” I said.

He winched my car up onto the bed in about four minutes. I climbed up into his cab with my purse in my lap and my phone in my hand, and we pulled out onto the interstate heading west as the first real light came over the hills behind us.