The Nine Wrecks on a Rented Rack

The phone call

I called Orval from the empty bay. I put it on speaker so Lu could hear through the truck window, but I am not sure that was a kindness.

“I sold it to a dealer out of Lancaster,” Orval said. “Thirty-eight thousand. It was a fair price. I had some obligations.”

“That was Lu’s machine,” I said. “He paid it off in April. Every payment came out of our account. I have the records, Orval. I wrote the checks myself.”

“It was bolted to my floor,” he said. “My name’s on the deed. Anything bolted down is part of the building, and I own half of the building. I don’t need anybody’s say-so to handle my own property.”

Then he hung up. He did not raise his voice once. Orval never raises his voice. He just decides a thing and then acts as though there was never anything to discuss.

I looked at Lu through the windshield. He had his eyes shut. His hands were flat on his knees, and I could see the knuckles going white.

The lot

Out on the gravel lot sat nine cars. I knew every one of them, because I had written up every estimate and talked to every adjuster.

Every one of them needed frame work before anything else could happen.

There was a gray minivan belonging to a nurse’s aide named Gwen who worked nights at a nursing home outside Waverly. She had two kids and her husband drove a truck over the road.

There was a mail carrier’s sedan with a crushed right front, which matters when you drive a rural route sitting on the right side of the car.

She had been using her husband’s pickup and hating every mile of it.

There was a dairy hand’s little hatchback that had been rear-ended at a stop sign.

He had been bumming rides to the barn at four in the morning for two weeks, and he had already been late twice.

There was a church van from one of the country congregations, a retired schoolteacher’s station wagon, two young couples’ commuter cars, a farm wife’s crossover, and a red pickup that had met a deer and then a ditch.

Every one of them had been promised for the following Friday. I had made those promises myself, sitting at the counter with the calendar, figuring Lu would be cleared to run pulls by then, or close to it, and Wes and I could do the rest.

I stood out there on the gravel and counted the cars twice. Nine. Nine families who needed a car to get to work, to the doctor, to church, to the barn before daylight.