“Dell. We have a prayer chain. We have a hardware store with a parking lot. We have, last I looked, a hose.” She breathed. “I’ll call Hank. You call Pastor Enos. And get some sleep. Tomorrow, you are going to wash cars.”
I did not sleep. I felt small and afraid, and I kept hearing Tobias say, A kid like that is used to it. At about midnight I went out and sat in the truck in the driveway, because that is where I pray when I can’t do it in the house. I did not ask for the money. I could not make myself. I said, Lord, if I am wrong about this, show me, and if I’m right, let them not be hurt for it. That was all. Then I sat there with the crickets going in the yard, and for the first time in two days I could breathe.
At six the next morning I pulled into the lot of Hank’s Hardware and Feed on Mill Street, and I stopped the truck, and I just sat there.
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They were already there.
Oleta had her clipboard and a folding table. There were buckets, stacked six high. Hank, who is seventy and has owned the store since before I was born, had run a pair of garden hoses out the side door and hooked up a third to the spigot by the loading dock. He stood there in his apron with his arms crossed and said, “Lot’s yours till dark. I’ll lock up when you’re gone. Don’t wash anything on the grass.”
Pastor Enos brought a hand-painted sign on a sheet of plywood. It said Cardinals Car Wash, Donations Welcome, Every Boy Plays. Somebody’s grandmother had painted a red bird in the corner, and it looked more like a chicken, and I loved it.
And here is the thing I have to tell you about that lot. It sits right on Mill Street. And directly across the road, thirty yards from where we set up, with a big front window facing the hardware store, is Tobias Tire and Auto.
By seven, the first car came through. By eight there was a line down Mill Street past the church, back around the block, and halfway to the courthouse square.
I have tried to describe that day to people since, and I have never done it right. Picture a gravel lot in June, a hundred and one degrees by noon, two dozen boys in cutoffs and T-shirts, soaked and shrieking, with sponges the size of loaves of bread, and the mothers working the line with a clipboard and a coffee can.
The old men from the Veterans hall came first, four of them, in lawn chairs, and set up at the edge of the lot as what they called “quality control.” They did not wash a single car. They pointed at spots the boys missed and said things like, “Streak, son. Left side. Again.” The boys loved it.
Frank from the funeral home brought the hearse, which we washed with great care and a lot of quiet jokes, and he handed Oleta a hundred-dollar bill and said, “Don’t tell anybody I was never here.”
“Frank,” she said, “you were never here.”
The volunteer fire department rolled a red pumper onto the hardware store lot so the boys could wash it, and then hosed the boys down for free. I have never heard so much screaming and laughing in my life.
At about eleven I looked over at the tire shop. The window was still lit. I could see a man standing there, broad through the shoulders, with his arms folded.