The Van With the Hidden Weld

The Van

I should tell you how I came to own that van, because the way it happened matters to what came after.

I am thirty-five. I am a nurse’s aide at Cottonwood Manor in Safford, on the day shift, six in the morning until two thirty. I rent a house in Pima with a swamp cooler that works when it wants to.

My husband left when Poppy was four months old, and the child support he owes me comes to four hundred dollars a month on paper and nothing in the mailbox.

For three years I worked every double that Cottonwood would give me. I changed bedding, turned residents, held hands at three in the morning, and put every extra check into a savings account at the credit union that I never let myself look at. By last May I had thirteen thousand nine hundred dollars.

The money was for a car. My old Corolla had two hundred and ten thousand miles on it and a leak I fed a quart of oil every Friday. In June it died on Highway 70 with both children in the back, in a hundred and six degrees.

I sat on the shoulder with the hazards ticking while a gravel truck went by close enough to rock the car. I told myself the next one would have room, and would be safe, and would never leave my kids on a highway.

Safe was the word I kept using. I want you to hear that.

I shopped for two months. I could not afford new, and I did not trust anybody I did not know. A woman at work, Dolores, told me Orson Stubbs was a fair man.

His lot sat on the highway in Safford under a big red sign, with a string of plastic flags and a banner on the football field fence that said he was proud to support our Bulldogs. He had been selling cars in the valley for thirty-one years.

I went on the second Saturday in August. It was a hundred and four. Orson came out of the office in a short-sleeve shirt and a feed store cap, a heavy, gentle man in his sixties with a limp from an old tractor accident, and he shook my hand and then he shook Brodie’s.

“This young man needs a window seat,” he said. “Let’s find him one.”

He showed me a 2015 Dodge Grand Caravan with seventy-one thousand miles, white, one owner, he said, traded in by a retired couple in Mesa. It was eleven thousand four hundred dollars out the door, which was more than I wanted to spend and less than the others on his lot.