The Tires in the Front Window

Gerald

Gerald’s truck turned onto Main at a quarter to twelve. I knew the sound of it, a white F-250 with a diesel knock, and I watched it slow down when he saw the little crowd, and speed up, and stop crooked across two parking spaces.

He climbed out in his clean shirt, with a manila folder under his arm. He looked sixty-nine that day, though he was sixty-one. He looked at the window first. Then he looked at the people. Then he looked at me.

“Take that down,” he said.

“Hello, Gerald.”

“I said take it down, Garrett. That is private property.”

“The tires are mine,” I said. “I carried them out of my wife’s van this morning. The window is yours. I’ll take the tires when you tell me the numbers on that paper are right.”

He was quiet. He walked up and stood at the glass with his folder under his arm, and I watched him read his own handwriting, and his own price, and the serial numbers that he had typed himself. He did not say one word for about a minute.

Wanda Tillman had not left. She stood a few feet off, holding her purse in both hands. A farmer cleared his throat. Somebody’s truck idled at the curb.

“Garrett,” Gerald said finally, in a low voice, only for me, “I did not do it to hurt Megan.”

“Then why?”

He glanced down at the folder in his hand. He opened it a little, and I saw a stack of letters with a bank’s name printed on the top one, and a line near the bottom stamped in red ink, past due.

“I’m thirty-eight thousand behind on the note,” he said. “The bank wants a payment by the fifteenth, and I don’t have it. Fleet customers pay late, and the margin on a four tire job is nothing, and I thought…” He stopped. “I thought, it’s family. They’d never check. Megan trusts me. I figured I’d put it back in the spring.”

I want to be fair to what he said, because I told Megan I would be, later. A man can be scared. A man can lie awake over a bank note and add and subtract on a napkin at three in the morning. I have been that man.

But I looked at the window, and I looked at him, and I said what I had been practicing in the truck.

“That’s a reason, Gerald. It isn’t a right. You could have asked me for six hundred dollars. You could have asked Megan. She would have given you the money out of her own pocket, and she would have worried about you the whole way home.”

“I couldn’t ask.”

“No,” I said. “But you could put her kids on a bald tire for eight months.”

He did not answer that. His face did something I will not describe, because I think a man is entitled to his face, even then.

“Take the tires out of my window,” he said again, more quietly.

“I will,” I said. “When you’ve done one thing.”

“What?”

“Megan’s money. Six hundred and forty dollars. Back in her hand. Not in mine, and not on the phone. In her hand, with you standing there.”

He stared at me. I thought he was going to refuse. I thought he might shove me, a big man in a bad week, and I had made up my mind that if he did I would not shove back.

He did not shove. He stood very still, with his folder, and then, in front of everyone, he gave one short nod.

I took the four tires out of his window myself. I did not take the invoice. I left that taped to the glass for another hour, because Kyle’s receipt was still on it, and because Wanda Tillman had asked me, politely, to wait until she took a picture.