The Girl With the Pressure Washer

Why She Wanted a Car

I should tell you about the car.

Kenzie turned sixteen in April and got her license on the first try.

There was a 2011 Ford Focus sitting in a yard on the south side of town with a for-sale sign in the back window. A widow was selling it. Her husband had kept every oil change receipt in the glove box. She wanted three thousand dollars, firm.

Kenzie looked at that car every day on the way to the pool. She told me she would have half of it by the end of summer and asked if I would match her. I said yes. I shook her hand on it, like a real deal.

So in June, when Rusty said he needed help in the hand-wash bay, it looked like a gift. Five dollars an hour, cash, as many hours as she wanted.

Five dollars is less than the law allows. Everyone at the table knew it when he offered. Rusty said it was a family arrangement, that she was learning a trade, that he could not afford more with the automatic eating him alive.

Fay looked at me. I looked at Kenzie. Kenzie wanted that car so bad she would have done it for three. So we let it go. That was my mistake, and I own it.

She worked six days a week. She came home sunburned and tired and happy, at least at first. She put her money in a coffee can on her dresser, a big red one that used to hold coffee, and she counted it every Sunday after church.

It never got much heavier. I noticed that and did not think hard enough about it. At five dollars an hour, a girl does not save fast, and I figured that was all it was.

Monday at Ida’s

Monday morning I had a route out east of town. Two farm tanks to fill, a church kitchen, and a hog barn that runs its heaters even in the summer for the baby pigs.

I finished early and drove back down Main at about ten. I parked the bobtail along the curb in front of the Hardware & Supply, because I needed a couple of brass fittings, and because I wanted to think.

Ida Nyquist has run that store for thirty-four years. The first twenty-eight she ran it with her husband. The last six she has run it alone, since he went in his sleep one February.

Ida was behind the counter in her reading glasses, sorting a box of screws into the little bins. She is sixty-six and about five foot nothing, and she has outlasted two big chain stores out by the highway.

“Lowell,” she said, without looking up. “You look like a man who needs something besides fittings.”

I laughed, because she always knows. “I need fittings too,” I said.

I got my fittings. Then I stood in the aisle by the outdoor equipment and looked at the pressure washers for a long time.

There was a gas one on the bottom shelf, twenty-eight hundred psi, with a box that had been opened and taped back up. The tag said two hundred and forty dollars. Next to it was a hose reel cart for forty-five.

I picked up the box. It was heavy. I carried it to the counter and set it down.

Ida took off her glasses and looked at me over the box. “Didn’t know propane drivers did their own trucks,” she said.

“It’s not for me.”

“Who’s it for?”

I told her. I did not mean to tell her all of it, but she has a way of standing very still that pulls the whole story out of a man. I told her about the bucket and the bank bag and the quarters. I told her about six hundred dollars and the coffee can on the dresser.

I told her about Kenzie not looking up.

Ida did not say anything for a long minute. She folded her glasses and set them in her shirt pocket. Out on Main, a grain truck went by, and the front window hummed a little in its frame.

Then she turned and pointed out that same front window, at the corner of her lot where it meets the side street.

“Spigot’s on the north wall,” she said. “Water’s on me. Saturday mornings are slow anyhow, and folks waiting on a car wash might as well buy a bag of birdseed.”

“Ida, I can’t ask you that.”

“You didn’t ask,” she said. “I offered. My husband washed his truck in that exact corner every Saturday for twenty years. It might as well get some use.”

She rang me up. Two hundred and forty for the washer, forty-five for the reel, and eleven for the fittings. Then she reached under the counter and set a gallon jug of car wash soap on top of the box.

“That one’s not on the ticket,” she said.