The Tires in the Front Window

The window

The front of Hutchins Tire and Auto is mostly glass. Gerald put it in himself in the nineties, a big bay window facing Main Street, with a customer lounge behind it that has two chairs and a table of old magazines. For thirty years it held a cardboard sign about oil changes and a plastic display of wiper blades.

Across the street are Casey’s, where half the county gets its coffee at six, and the post office, and the diner. In other words, the window faces everybody.

I carried the four bald tires in one at a time, past the counter and the magazines and into the display bay, and I stacked them like a little tower, one on top of another. Gerald’s good scale model of a racing tire went on the floor.

It was an honest looking tower. Four old tires, gray, slick as river rock, with the tread worn almost to the belts and the date code facing out. I turned each one so the sidewall numbers faced the glass. Anybody standing out on the sidewalk with decent eyes could have read 1218.

Then I took the yellow invoice out of my pocket, the one with the six hundred and forty dollars and the four serial numbers that did not match, and I smoothed it flat against the top tire. I taped it down at all four corners with the roll of blue masking tape from the counter.

I did not write anything on it. I did not need to. The paper said what it said.

Then I took Kyle’s receipt for four hundred and eighty dollars, the one for the new tires he had just sold me, and I taped that one next to it. Two sheets of paper side by side on a stack of bald tires. A man could stand there and compare them in about thirty seconds.

I stepped outside, and I stood on the sidewalk with my hands in my jacket pockets, and I looked at what I had made.

It was ten after nine on a Monday. I had done it in front of God and Main Street. I want you to know I did not enjoy it. My heart was going like I had run up a hill.

But I felt something I had not felt in years, and it took me a while to name it. It was the feeling of having said a true thing out loud in a room where nobody else would say it.