The Book of Unknown Americans(45)

After a few minutes, a small, gray-haired man in a plaid jacket came out to greet us.

“G’morning,” he said, shaking my dad’s hand. “How can I help you folks today?”

“We want to buy a car,” my dad said.

The man nodded. “We’ve got a few. D’jda have something in particular in mind? A sedan or a wagon? A truck maybe?”

“I like something fast,” my dad said.

“A sports car?” the man asked.

My mom tugged my dad’s sleeve like some kind of warning that he’d better not get too carried away. Predictably, my dad ignored her.

“Do you have anything Italian?” my dad asked, as if he hadn’t just seen everything on the lot.

“An Italian sports car?” The man’s eyes widened. “ ’Fraid not. What we’ve got here is mostly American or Japanese. There’s a few Volkswagens in the bunch. But Volkswagen’s about as European as you’re gonna get. I have one, about fifteen years old, that still runs about as good as Secretariat when she was in her prime. Transmission’s manual, so you could probably crank it up, get her going pretty speedy. You wanna take a look?”

I doubted my dad understood everything the man said, but he followed as the man led us to the back corner of the field where a small car, brown like cocoa powder, sat in the sun.

“Here she is,” the man said. “Just got her last week from a fellow down in Bear. Not much wrong with her as far as I can tell. There’s a dent in the hood and the seat belts are a little slack, but the lights work, gearshift is smooth as silk, and it’s got power steering. Only thirty-two thousand miles. Little bit of rust around the wheel wells, as you can see, but the radio works. AC still gets cold. Not that you need it this time of year.” He chuckled. “She’ll probably last you another ten years. A real beauty if you ask me.”

I wouldn’t have gone that far. The car was small and unspectacular. But compared to the rest of the inventory, it might as well have been a Lamborghini, and I could tell by the way my dad was eyeing it that he was hooked.

“How much?” he asked.

“We run the Kelley Blue Book values on all these, so our prices are fair.”

“How much?” my dad asked again.

“Twenty-three hundred,” the man said.

My mom made a noise.

“You got that?” the man asked.

My dad, suddenly a master negotiator, shrugged. “We were just looking,” he said.

“You aren’t gonna find much better than this,” the man said, patting the car’s hood.

My dad peeked in the passenger-side window.

“Twenty-two hundred,” the man offered. “Times are tough. I’ll give you folks a break.”

My dad wandered around to the other side of the car and checked out the view through the driver’s-side window after smudging some frost away with the heel of his hand.

My mom shivered against the wind. “Rafa,” she said.

The old man glanced at her, apparently interpreting this as my mom’s way of telling my dad that it was time to go, because he said, “Okay. Two thousand even. That’s the best I can do. And you can drive her off the lot today.”

My dad took one more lap around the car, the sunlight bouncing off its rear windshield. Then he asked, “Do you take a check?”


WE DROVE HOME, two thousand dollars poorer, in our new Volkswagen Rabbit. In that big field, the old man, whose name we learned after we agreed to buy the car was Ralph Mason, gave my dad a quick lesson in the vagaries of manual transmission. My mom and I sat in the backseat as Mr. Mason, from the passenger side, took my dad through the gears, telling him when to depress the clutch and when to let it go. “Take her up!” Mr. Mason would shout. “Give her gas!” And my dad would obey the best he could. He was a mess at first, and each time the car twitched my mom would exclaim, “Ay!” but he took to the basic coordination of it surprisingly easily. After ten minutes, Mr. Mason declared my dad a natural. “Best student I’ve ever had,” he said, clapping my dad on the shoulder, and my dad beamed. In the backseat, my mom rolled her eyes.

My dad didn’t stall once on the drive home. Of course, he never made it above thirty miles per hour, either, even when we got on the stretch of Route 141 between I-95 and Kirkwood Highway. He crept onto 141 cautiously, like a beetle onto the tip of a branch, and kept a steady pace even though all the other cars in existence were flying past us at warp speed, honking as they swerved by.

“What are you doing?” my mom asked, buckled into her seat belt in the front.

My dad, focused on the road ahead, said nothing.

“Everyone’s passing us!”

“Let them,” he said, gripping the steering wheel with both hands now that we were in gear.

“No, this is not good, Rafa. You have to keep up.”

“The speed limit is fifty,” I said, trying to be helpful.

My mom peered at the speedometer. “You’re only going twenty-five!”

Again, my dad said nothing. He offered no explanation, no defense. He just focused on the road ahead and on steering the car.

A semi-truck roared by, sounding a long honk as it did. From on high, the driver gave us the finger.

“I can’t look,” my mom said, putting her hand over her eyes. “This is awful.”