I asked all the questions I knew to ask. Had it been in an accident? He looked me in the eye and said the history report was clean and the title was clean, and he handed me the report to read myself. It was clean. I read every line.
I asked if I could have a mechanic look at it. He said sure, of course, but it was a hundred and four degrees on that gravel and he had two other customers waiting on that van, and the man who did his inspections was on vacation until after Labor Day.
I told myself I could not afford to wait a week. I told myself he would not have handed me the report if there was anything on it.
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When I signed, Orson knelt down on the gravel with his bad knee and buckled Poppy into her car seat himself, in the middle of the back, and pulled the strap twice to make sure it was snug. “There you go, little lady,” he said. Then he gave Brodie a root beer from the office cooler.
I drove home with the windows down and the radio on, the first car I had ever owned that did not frighten me. I cried a little, out of relief. I thought, we are going to be all right.
As Is
That same night, in the dark of the shop parking lot, I called Orson with my hands still shaking.
“Now, Deena,” he said, in that slow kind voice, “I’m sorry to hear about all that. I really am. But I bought that van at an auction with a clean title, same as I buy all of them. If there was repair work, I never saw it. You’ll want to bring it by, and we’ll take a look.”
“I took it to a mechanic.”
“Well,” Orson said. “Mechanics will tell you whatever they see.”
I drove to the lot on Wednesday on my lunch break, in Nacho’s loaner, a gray 2004 Buick LeSabre that smelled like pipe tobacco, and I sat in Orson’s office and laid Nacho’s photographs on the desk.
Orson looked at them for a long time. His face did something small, a tightening around the mouth, there and gone. Then he slid the photographs back across the desk, square to the edge, the way you return a bad hand of cards.
“You signed the buyer’s guide,” he said gently. “It’s marked as is, no warranty. I wish I could do something. I can offer you two thousand dollars toward a trade on anything on the lot. No hard feelings.”
I stood up. I did not yell. I have worked with people in the last hours of their lives, and I know that you can say the hardest thing in the world very quietly. I told him I had a two-year-old girl who had ridden in the middle of that van every day for eight weeks, and he had buckled her into it himself.
Orson Stubbs would not look up from the desk.
“I’ll pray for you,” he said.