The Nine Wrecks on a Rented Rack

Orval

By three thirty all nine cars had driven off the lot. Every customer had picked up on time. The gravel was empty except for Orval’s truck by the fence and the rental trailer.

Orval sat there another few minutes. Then his door opened, and he got out, slow, the way old men get out of trucks, one hand on the door frame.

He walked across the gravel toward the bay. He walked past Lu and me without looking at us and stood in front of the rented rack, the one sitting in the square where his son’s machine used to be.

He looked at it for a long time. He put his hand on the tower the same way Wes had on Saturday.

“All nine?” he said finally. He did not turn around.

“All nine,” I said. “On time. Every one.”

“On a rental,” he said.

“Four hundred fifty a week,” I said. “Your son talked me through every pull from his recliner. Wes did the clamping. I did the measuring. It was slow. It worked.”

Orval stood there with his back to us. I could see his shoulders, and I saw them drop, just a little, like something had gone out of them.

“I had obligations,” he said. “Your brother’s camper. The bank was calling me at the house.”

“I know about the camper, Dad,” Lu said. His voice was very quiet. “Dorsey told me. You could have asked me. You could have come in this shop and sat down and asked me.”

Orval did not answer.

“You sold my tools while I couldn’t stand up,” Lu said. “That’s what you did. I want you to hear me say it, so you don’t think I didn’t notice.”

Orval turned around then. He looked at Lu on his cane, and he looked at me with my gloves still on, and he looked at Wes standing by the paint booth door.

He did not say he was sorry. Not then. He just nodded, once, the way you nod when somebody hands you a bill you knew was coming. Then he walked back to his truck and drove away.

The weeks after

I did not hear from Orval for three weeks. He was not in his pew the next two Sundays. Dorsey said he was home, that he was all right, that he was just quiet.

The shop kept running. The supply man let us keep the rental week to week, and work kept coming in, more than before.

A lot of it was people I had never met who had heard about the nine cars and wanted to give us their business.

Lu started physical therapy. By the second week of November he could stand in the shop for an hour at a time, and he started running pulls again, slow, from a stool, with Wes doing the heavy work and me measuring.

We did not talk about Orval much. Some nights after supper Lu would sit in his recliner and look at nothing, and I knew where he was, and I let him be there.