The Girl With the Pressure Washer

Going to See Rusty

I went to see him on Wednesday. I went in the middle of the morning, in broad daylight, in my gray company shirt, with the bobtail parked out front where anybody could see it.

I did not go to fight. I had promised Fay. I went because a man ought to look another man in the eye before something like this sets hard.

Rusty was in the office behind the counter with a calculator and a pile of invoices. The air conditioner in the window was rattling. He looked up when the screen door slapped and then looked back down at the invoices.

“Lowell.”

“Rusty.”

I stood in front of the counter. He kept punching numbers. I let him punch them for a while. Then he set the calculator down.

“Came to rub it in?”

“No,” I said. “I came to tell you that she’s not coming back. And I came to tell you why, because you didn’t ask her.”

He looked at me. His face was tired. He had lost weight since spring, and there were gray whiskers on his chin he had not shaved.

“I know why,” he said.

“Then you know about the bucket.”

He did not say anything. He looked out the window at the empty hand-wash bay. The concrete pad was dry. The milk crate was still there, but there was no bucket on it now.

“That automatic out on the highway takes a card and washes a truck in four minutes,” he said. “Seven dollars. No tip. I’ve lost forty percent since it opened. I’m behind on the note. I thought family would help. I thought she’d understand.”

“She’s sixteen, Rusty.”

“I know how old she is.”

“She was saving for a car. She’d have given you every dime if you had asked her. That’s who she is. But you didn’t ask. You took it out of the bucket every night while she stood there and watched you do it.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them away his eyes were red.

“I told myself it was the business’s money,” he said. “I told myself it was the same as the water and the soap.”

“It wasn’t.”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

I did not ask him for the six hundred dollars. I had thought about it all the way over. Kenzie would not have wanted me to, and Fay would not have either. Some debts a man has to decide to pay on his own, or they don’t mean anything.

“Fay’s setting a plate for you at Thanksgiving,” I said. “Same as always. Same as every year. That’s not changing.”

He looked up at me.

“And Kenzie’s out in Ida’s lot every Saturday till school starts,” I said. “Ten dollars a car. Same as you charge. She wouldn’t go under you. She thought about that before she ever painted the sign.”

I turned and walked out. I heard the calculator start up again behind me, slow, and then stop.