My mother had a tea towel in her hand. She had come out with a tea towel because she had been doing the dishes when the doorbell went, and she stood there holding it for the whole of it.
Maisie was nine and she was sitting on the porch step with a paper plate.
And Wade did the thing that men like that do when a room has gone against them, which is get louder and friendlier.
He clapped his hands once and said, “Right! Who wants a look?” — at nobody, at the driveway generally — and he opened the driver’s door and put the seat back and started telling Ollie about the engine.
For about ninety seconds that man gave a tour of a car to an eleven-year-old who did not know what was happening.
And Hollis stood next to me the whole time with a set of keys in his fist and did not say one word.
And then Wade shut the door and the tour was over because there was nobody left to give it to, and that was when he said the thing to my mother about letting him know when I grew up.
It was the only genuinely unbearable part of that afternoon and it lasted a minute and a half and nobody has ever mentioned it since.
And that is the end of the part everybody likes.
I felt about ten feet tall for roughly nine days.
And then that car started costing money.
A brand-new car, insured for a seventeen-year-old, in his own name, in October of 2013.
Four thousand one hundred dollars for the first year.
And I did not know that number at the time. I did not think about insurance once. I was seventeen and somebody had put a car on my driveway and the word insurance did not enter my head for one second.
Wade never paid it.
He was never going to. It never came up. There was no argument about it and no broken promise, because nobody ever asked him, because everybody in that house knew there was no point.
Hollis paid it.
Four thousand one hundred dollars in the first year and three thousand eight hundred in the second.
Eight thousand nine hundred dollars.
