For six weeks she had been getting rides. Mrs. Wozniak drove her on Mondays. A man from the hospital laundry drove her on Wednesdays and talked the whole way about his gallbladder. The other nights she walked down to the corner of Lake and Fourth and waited for whoever could take her, and twice that I knew of, nobody came, and she walked. She walked three and a half miles at ten-thirty at night in white shoes and came home at seven-thirty in the morning and slept until two and got up and made my little sister, Fritzie, a grilled cheese and asked me about my day as if her feet were not swollen to the ankle.
On the used lot at Conway Chevrolet, out on Route 57 across from the bowling alley, there was a 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger, pale green, with a white vinyl top that had started to peel at the corner like a sunburn. The windshield had CLEAN — ONE OWNER — $850 written in yellow grease pencil. My mother had seen it from the window of Mrs. Wozniak's Buick. She had not said she wanted it. She had said, "That's a sensible little car," which in my mother's language was the same as falling to her knees.
Eight hundred and fifty dollars. My father had sent two hundred toward it already, folded into a letter that said only, For the green car, love to all, and I had sixty-one dollars in a Band-Aid tin from mowing lawns in May. The car wash, if the weather held and the line held and Dennis's cherry trees held, could get me the rest by the middle of August. I had done the math on the back of my geometry book so many times that the numbers had worn through to the cardboard.
I did not tell Dennis any of this because Dennis would have tried to give me his half, and I could not have stood that. The Okonskis had six kids in a house built for three, and Dennis's father worked the open hearth at U.S. Steel in Lorain on whatever shifts were left now that the mill was cutting them, and Dennis's own money was spoken for. In September he was supposed to start as an apprentice at Vukovich Collision on East Broad, the best body shop in the county, which was a thing nobody from our street ever got. Hutch Vukovich did not hire kids. He had hired Dennis because Dennis had walked into his shop at fifteen with a Chevy Nova fender he had pulled out of a ditch and