The Tires in the Front Window

Main Street

The first car to stop was a green Buick. Wanda Tillman, who taught second grade to half the town, including me, slowed down and then pulled right up on the curb with her window rolled down.

She looked at the stack for a long time. Then she looked at me.

“Garrett,” she said, “is that what I think it is?”

“I’d rather not say what it is, Mrs. Tillman. I’d rather you read it.”

“Well, I can’t read it from here.”

“The paper on top is the invoice for my wife’s tires. The tires under it came off her van this morning. They’re eight years old. The ones on her van now, my wife already paid for, and I had to buy them again.”

Wanda Tillman turned off her engine. She got out of that Buick in her church coat and walked up to the glass like she was reading a plaque in a museum. She read the whole paper. Then she opened her purse and pulled out a folded yellow sheet of her own.

“Gerald put new tires on my Buick in September,” she said. “Two hundred and eighty dollars. I haven’t looked at them since.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe I should,” she said, and she walked around to her own back wheel, bent down in her good shoes, and read the sidewall.

By ten o’clock there were nine people on the sidewalk. A farmer I knew from the co-op. Two women from the diner who had come out in their aprons. A man in a county road department truck, one of my own crew, who rolled down his window and said only, “Well, I’ll be.”

By ten thirty there were about twenty, and I will say what I am proudest of, which is that nobody was loud. Nobody called Gerald a name. They read the paper and they went and looked at their own tires. A few of them went home to find their own invoices.

A man I had never seen before, in an Elk Fork Feed cap, stood next to me for a while and watched the glass. “Whose tires are those?” he asked.

“My wife’s.”

“She know you’re doing this?”

“No, sir.”

“She will,” he said, and he nodded slowly, like a man who respected that.