And then he said one more thing, standing on the porch steps, and it was the thing that surprised me most.
"The Dart," he said to my mother. "I'd ask you not to buy it."
My mother raised her eyebrows.
"Winthrop tells me he told you the vinyl top needs replacing. That's true. What he didn't know to tell you, because I never told him, is that the transmission slips going into second. We were going to sell it as-is and let the next owner find out." He looked down at his hat. "It's not a car for somebody who has to get to the hospital at eleven at night in January. I'll be taking it off the lot."
My mother looked at him for a long moment. "That's an honest thing to say, Mr. Conway."
"I'm trying it out," he said. "It's a new line of business."
So there was no Dart. I want to be clear about that, because I know how these stories are supposed to go, and this is not one of those. There was no free car with a bow on it in our driveway, and no secret check in the mailbox, and no long-lost anything. There was a Band-Aid tin on top of our refrigerator with two hundred and forty-nine dollars and thirty-five cents in it, and the rest of the summer to go.
But some things did change, in small, practical ways that I would only see the size of later. Mrs. Prochazka, who played bridge with Win's grandmother and was the most efficient human being in Lorain County, organized something she called the Night Shift Circle, which was a mimeographed schedule taped to the bulletin board in the Saint Casimir's vestibule, with a column for every night of the week and a line for a name and a phone number. By the second Sunday it had twenty-two names on it. Nurses' aides and orderlies and laundry workers and a janitor at the county courthouse, people from Furnace Street and Lake Avenue and Fourth, who had been walking or waiting on corners, and people who had cars and drove that way anyway. My mother's name was on it. So, in the Wednesday column, in neat block capitals, was WINTHROP CONWAY, followed by the phone number of the house on Washington Avenue.
He drove an old brown Chevette from the back row of the used lot. It had a radio that only picked up AM and a passenger door you had to lift to close. He drove my mother to Elyria Memorial every Wednesday night at