The Girl With the Pressure Washer

The Saturdays

The second Saturday there were nineteen cars waiting at seven-thirty, and Kenzie washed thirty-six by four.

The second Saturday a boy from the football team asked if he could help dry for a share of the tips. Kenzie hired him at ten dollars an hour, which was more than she could really afford, and she paid him out of the coffee can every afternoon before she counted her own.

“I’m not going to do it the way Uncle Rusty did,” she told me. “I’m going to do it the way Miss Ida does.”

Every Saturday morning, before a single customer, she washed my propane truck first. I was not even on call the second week. I drove the bobtail over anyway, on purpose, and she washed it, and she would not take my money.

“Paid up for life,” she would say. And every time, I would have to go look at the street for a minute.

By the end of July the red coffee can on Kenzie’s dresser was closing in on her half of that little Ford, and the widow on the south side had promised to hold it for her.

Ida kept the water jug full and the folding chair in the shade. Lonnie came every week whether his truck needed it or not. He sat in the chair for an hour each time, talking cattle prices with whoever was waiting, and he always dropped a five in the coffee can.

The Last Saturday of July

It was a bright, clear morning, already hot by eight. There were twenty-three cars in line. Ida had a second folding chair out by then, and two water jugs, and a box of doughnuts from the café on the cooler next to the sign.

Kenzie was working on a minivan. The football boy was drying a Silverado. Lonnie was in his chair. I was on my bucket, in my gray shirt and my cap, taking ten-dollar bills.

At about nine-thirty a dark blue pickup came down the side street from Main. It had a dent in the tailgate.

It did not slow down and drive on this time. It turned on its blinker. Then it pulled up behind the last car in line, right at the corner by the post office, and stopped.

Kenzie saw it. She stopped with the wand in her hand. The football boy saw her stop and stopped too.

“Keep going, Bug,” I said quietly. “He’s in line like everybody else.”

She looked at me. Then she nodded and went back to the minivan.

Rusty sat in that line for forty minutes. He did not get out. He did not honk. He did not cut ahead, and nobody waved him ahead either. He moved up one car length at a time, with the window down and his elbow on the door, like any man on a Saturday morning.

Nobody said a word to him. That was the town’s whole answer, and it was enough.

When his turn came he pulled his pickup onto the pad in the corner of Ida’s lot. He turned off the engine and got out and stood by the cooler next to me. He did not look at me. He looked at his niece.

Kenzie washed his truck exactly the way she washed every truck. Pressure washer, two buckets, the mitt, the wheel brush, the step stool, the chamois. She did not do it faster and she did not do it slower. She did the tailgate around the dent careful, so the water would not sit in it.

It took her twenty-two minutes. When she was done she coiled the hose and walked over to the cooler, wiping her hands on her shorts, and stood in front of her uncle.

“Ten dollars, Uncle Rusty,” she said.

He looked at her for a long moment. I saw his throat move.

Then he took out his wallet, and he took out a ten-dollar bill, and he put it in her hand. Full price, the same as everybody else in that line.