Gerald Hutchins handed me the receipt across the counter like he was handing me a birthday card. “Family rate,” he said. “Tell Megan her old man took care of her. Six hundred and forty, and I barely cleared my cost.”
I had Lily on my hip, three years old and chewing the strap of her own overalls. The shop smelled the way it always did, rubber and floor cleaner and the burnt coffee that sat in the pot from six in the morning until closing.
Behind the counter, the clock shaped like a tire said ten past four. Out in the bay, a kid named Kyle was sweeping rubber dust toward a drain, and Megan’s silver minivan sat on the lot with its sliding door still open.
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“That’s a lot of money for tires,” I said. I did not say it hard. I said it the way you say something you already know the answer to.
Gerald laughed, a short one through the nose. “Garrett, you’ve been driving a farm truck with a cracked windshield since you were twenty. You wouldn’t know a good tire from a bad one if it bit you.”
That was Gerald. He could slide a knife in and make it sound like a joke at a church supper. I was thirty-three years old, a husband and a father of three, and I stood there nodding like a boy who had been told to wait in the truck.
I paid with Megan’s debit card, because she had texted me the numbers from the hospital break room. Six hundred and forty dollars came out of the account we were saving for Emma’s braces and a new water heater.
Gerald folded the invoice once and slipped it into my shirt pocket himself. “Don’t lose that. Warranty.”
I did not lose it. That folded sheet of yellow paper rode in my wallet for four days, and I never read it, because it did not occur to me that a man who taught my wife to ride a bike would write something on it that was not true.
I will tell you plainly how it went, because the whole town heard a version of it by Saturday, and most of them told it wrong. Nobody yelled. Nobody got arrested. I did not touch Gerald Hutchins, and I did not call a lawyer, though somebody did suggest it.
I stacked four tires in a window. That is the whole crime, if you want to call it one. The rest of it was done by people who walked down Main Street on a Monday morning and looked.