The Tires in the Front Window

What I had in my toolbox

I do not own a tire shop, but I do not need one. I farm eighty rented acres on the side of my day job with the county road department, and I have mounted every trailer tire and every tractor tire I have ever owned. I keep a hand bead breaker and a set of irons and rim guards in the toolbox of my truck.

Megan had my truck, so I borrowed Kyle’s cart and wheeled the Hankooks out into the lot, one at a time, in the cold gray light of a Monday morning in early November. The oaks along Main Street still had their last rust colored leaves, and the sky was the plain bright blue you only get right after the first hard frost.

I pulled the van’s wheels with Kyle’s impact wrench, which he handed over like it was a hot coal. Four lugs each, then four more, then four more. It took twenty minutes just to get all four wheels off and lined up on the pavement.

I broke the beads and I pried the bald tires off the rims, and the old rubber came away with a long dry crack, like a stick breaking. I looked at the inside of the first one. The belt had a bulge in the shoulder you could feel with your thumb.

That one would have blown. Maybe not Tuesday. Maybe not in November. But some January morning on the county road, in the dark, with Colby asleep in his booster seat and Lily kicking her feet, it would have blown.

I set my jaw and kept working. Kyle watched for a minute, and then he said something I will always give him credit for.

“You’ll need these balanced,” he said. “You can’t run an eighty mile day on unbalanced tires. I’ll spin them on the machine. I’ll do it right.”

“Gerald will see it.”

“Yes, sir,” Kyle said. “I know.”

He took each wheel into the bay, one at a time, and he spun it and set the weights and brought it back out, and he never once looked at the street. When he handed me the last one, his hands were shaking a little.

“My mom’s going to kill me,” he said.

“I don’t think she will.”

I mounted the new tires on the van, and I did it right, torqued in a star pattern with a wrench I did not trust the shop for.

By nine twenty, the van sat on four square new Hankooks with deep black treads and little rubber hairs on the shoulders, and the four bald ones lay in a pile in the lot, with the old lug marks still stained into the rim lines.

I looked at those four tires for a long minute. I thought about my daughter, and her penny.