The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
“Orville would be glad,” Rick Hanlon said, and he slid the keys across the counter to me like he was handing over a gift.
It was a Thursday, a little after four, in the front office of Burkett Tire and Auto on the east edge of Keeler. The office smelled of rubber and burnt coffee. Behind the glass, my Grand Marquis sat in the second bay with its hood closed and a paper mat on the floor.
I had just written a check for $3200. It was the largest check I had ever signed alone.
“Good as new,” Rick said. “Better, really. That old transmission was a ticking bomb, Mrs. Wachter. Another week and it would have let go on you out on Highway 74.”
“I’m glad I brought it in, then,” I said.
I meant it. I stood there with my purse on my arm and I thanked him. I thanked him twice.
He came around the counter and walked me out to the car. He held the door. When I sat down he leaned in and tapped the roof twice with his knuckles, the way Orville used to rap the side of a grain truck to tell the driver he was clear of the scale.
“You tell the ladies at church where to come,” Rick said.
“I will,” I said.
I did tell them. I just did not tell them what he expected.
I want to go back a few days, so you understand how a woman my age ends up writing a check like that to a man she has known since he rode on the tailgate of his daddy’s pickup.
The trouble started on Monday, on the way home from the grocery in Arvilla, nineteen miles from my house. I was on Highway 74 with a sack of flour and a pound of coffee on the seat when the car gave a shudder, like a horse stepping on a nail. The needle jumped. The engine climbed up high and loud and the car would not go faster than a man could ride a bicycle.
The check-engine light came on. I knew that light. I did not know what it meant.
I put on my flashers and crept the last twelve miles home in whatever gear the car had decided to keep, with a line of grain trucks stacking up behind me. Not one of them honked. That is the kind of county it is.
Orville always handled the cars.
My husband ran the scale at the Keeler co-op elevator for fifty-two years. Every truck that came in off the section roads stopped on his platform, and he wrote the weight on a ticket in pencil, and he used to say a number that was not written down had never happened. He kept every vehicle we ever owned running with a wrench, a funnel and a stubborn streak. When he died, fourteen months ago this August, I could have told you where the gas went in and which pedal was which. That was the whole of it.
The Grand Marquis was a 2005, bought used from a retired schoolteacher in Kingfisher. Orville picked it for the bench seat, so I could slide across it without climbing over anything. It had a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. It had never once left either of us standing.