The First New Car of Her Life
“It’s fifteen hundred dollars, Mom. It’s a scooter, not a yacht.” My brother’s voice came out of the phone on Mom’s kitchen table so loud I could hear every word from the sink.
Mom had the phone on speaker because she can’t hear it otherwise anymore.
Her checkbook lay open beside her coffee cup, the pen already uncapped, the way it had been every time Shane called that year.
“I know it’s not a yacht, honey,” she said. She said it softly. She always said everything to Shane softly, the same way she used to talk to him when he was six and sick with an earache.
I kept my back to them and ran water over a coffee cup that was already clean.
I had come by after work to look at her Buick, not to listen to this, but there was nowhere else in that little kitchen to stand.
“It’s for getting to the train,” Shane said. “Parking up here is killing me. You know that. A scooter, I ride it to the station, I lock it up, I’m done with the garage and I’m done with the tickets.”
The tickets. I set the cup in the drainer and dried my hands on the towel that hung from the oven door.
My mother had paid a thousand dollars of my brother’s Chicago parking tickets in September.
I knew that because she had told me herself, sitting in that same chair, a little proud of it. “He was going to get booted,” she’d said. “They put a boot on your wheel up there, Stacy. Like a criminal.”
And in August she had paid the money due at signing on his new BMW. He called it the delivery fee.
It was really the destination charge, the bank’s fee for starting the lease, and the first month, all at once. Twenty-seven hundred dollars.
All of it came out of her check. My mother is sixty-eight. She has been a widow for three years.
She lives on Social Security, the survivor benefit she gets from Dad’s work record, and whatever is left in the savings account they built together.
The Buick in her driveway needed a transmission. Jim at the shop on Main had put it on the lift the week before and come out wiping his hands and shaking his head.
Thirty-eight hundred to rebuild it, he said, and he wasn’t padding it.
Mom had told me she couldn’t swing that. She’d quit driving the Buick to church because it slipped so badly pulling away from the stop sign at the Methodist corner that a pickup had nearly rear-ended her.
“Mom?” Shane said. “You there? I can come down next weekend and get it, or you can just mail it. Whatever’s easier for you.”
Whatever was easier for her. I folded the towel in thirds and hung it back on the oven door and made myself breathe through my nose, the way I tell nervous 4-H kids to breathe before they walk a steer into the show ring.
“Let me think on it, honey,” Mom said. “I’ll call you this weekend.”
“Think on it?” There was a little pause on the line, and I could picture his face, the face he made at twelve when Dad said no to a dirt bike. “Okay. Sure. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you too.”
She pressed the red button with one finger. Then she sat looking at the open checkbook for a long time. She didn’t write anything.