The Clutch She Finished on the Gravel

“I heard what Curtis did,” she said. “Somebody from church called me last night. I figured you’d call to say it’d be next week.”

“It’s done,” I said again. “Come on whenever.”

She came at 3:15. Her neighbor’s wife dropped her off at the edge of the gravel and waited in the car. Nadine walked across slowly in her barn coat, looked at the Ford, and then at me.

I showed her the old disc in the box. She held it in both hands and turned it over, and her eyes went bright.

“He bought this truck new,” she said. “He used to say it’d outlast him. I guess it did.”

“It’ll outlast both of us now,” I said. “New everything in there.”

She handed the disc back to me and climbed up into the cab. She did not start it. She sat there with her hand on the shifter, just resting it on the knob, for a long time.

Finally she looked down at me. “He’d have liked that you did it out here,” she said. “He always said a real mechanic didn’t need a building. Just a flat place and a reason.”

I had to turn my head and look at the highway for a minute.

The bill came to $897, with the parts, the fluid, and seven hours of labor.

She wrote the check out right there on the dash in slow, careful handwriting, and she put an extra twenty in my coverall pocket and would not take it back.

“That’s for lunch,” she said. “Lavonne told me she had to stand over you.”

She drove it home a day early. I watched that green truck go down the highway and turn off east at the county road, and it pulled away smooth and quiet and did not slip once.

On Thursday she hauled her eleven calves to West Plains herself. She called me that evening to say they brought a good price, and the truck pulled that trailer up the lane like it was empty.

I did not know yet that the rest of the county had been watching me that Tuesday. I found out Thursday morning, and it started with Toby.

He came in a little after nine. It was his day off.

He had on a clean flannel shirt instead of his work shirt from the store, and he was holding a cup of coffee for me and one for him.

“Rhea,” he said, “did Dean ever keep the loan papers? For the lift?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The bank has them, I guess. Why?”

“Because Curtis has been telling people at the coffee shop that he paid half of that lift,” Toby said. “He’s saying Dean couldn’t make the payments and he had to cover them. He’s saying it to everybody.”

I set the coffee down. “That’s not true.”

“I know it’s not,” Toby said. “But you know how it is. Nobody can say it’s not unless they see something.”

I looked over at the safe under the front counter. It was an old one, black and heavy, on rollers.

Dean bought it at an estate sale our first year. He kept the shop’s important papers in it, and I had never learned the combination.

After the funeral, I had meant to call somebody to drill it. Then I just did not, because opening it felt like going through his pockets.

“He told me the combination once,” Toby said quietly. “Five or six years ago. He said, ‘In case something ever happens to me, and Rhea needs something out of there.’ I wrote it in my wallet.”