The Tires in the Front Window

The drive

You have to understand what that van is to us. Megan is a licensed practical nurse on the surgical floor at the hospital in Sedalia, and our three kids go to school there too, because the elementary in Elk Fork closed two years ago and the consolidated district bus takes ninety minutes each way.

So she drives them. Forty miles each way, on Highway 65 and then a county road with no shoulder, at ten past six in the morning, in the dark from November until March. Emma is nine, Colby is six, and Lily rides along until the preschool at the hospital opens.

Her shifts rotate. Some weeks she works seven to three, some weeks she works the long twelves, and some weeks she sleeps in the van in the hospital lot for forty minutes because the road home is too long to drive tired.

That is eighty miles a day on four tires, with our whole life buckled into the back seat. I had been watching the clock on that van’s tires for a year without knowing it.

The reason I did not just walk back in on Thursday and say something is simple. Megan loves her father. Her mother passed when she was fifteen, and Gerald raised her in the apartment above that tire shop, doing homework on the counter.

If I had gone in with a feeling, with a hunch that his price looked high, she would have taken his side before I finished the sentence. She would have been right to, too. A feeling is not a thing you can set on a counter.

So I did nothing for four days, and on the fifth day my nine year old daughter did my job for me.

The penny

It was Sunday after church. I was in the driveway, hosing mud off the van because Megan had a twelve hour shift coming Monday, and Emma came out in her good tights with her shoes untied.

She crouched by the front tire the way a little farmer crouches by a calf. She had something in her fist.

“Daddy,” she said. “Can I do the penny thing?”

“What penny thing?”

“The one Grandpa showed me. You put Lincoln in the tread upside down, and if you can see his whole head, it’s time for new tires.”

She pushed the penny into the groove with her thumb. It did not go in. It sat on top of the rubber, practically level, like a coin laid flat on a table, and every bit of Lincoln’s face and shoulders and collar stared up at the sky.

“Is that bad?” Emma asked.

I knelt down next to her. The rubber was smooth. I do not mean worn. I mean the little raised wear bars that run across the grooves had gone flush, and on the outside edge the tire had a bald shine on it like the toe of an old work boot.

I put my hand on the tire and I felt something go quiet inside me, a cold flat feeling, the same one I get when I find a fence cut and the cattle already gone.

“Those are the old ones,” I said, mostly to myself. “Those are the same ones. Gerald put on the new ones Wednesday.”

Emma looked at me. She is nine, and she has her mother’s way of looking at you until you hear what you just said.

“These don’t look new, Daddy,” she said. “These look like Grandpa’s old truck.”

I turned my head and read the sidewall, down low, where the little oval holds the date code. The last four digits tell you the week and the year the tire was born. Those four numbers said 1218. Week twelve of 2018.

That tire was more than eight years old, and it was bald.

I did not go in the house yet. I stood in the driveway with my hose running into the grass, and I took the folded yellow invoice out of my wallet for the first time.