bear trap and a passenger door that only opened from the outside and two hundred and sixty thousand miles on it, and every time it started it sounded like a man clearing his throat to say something unpleasant. Imogene had tried it once, in the church lot. She had stalled it eleven times. On the twelfth she had gotten it rolling, and then forgot to press the clutch when she braked and stalled it again, and had turned to him with her face pale and set and said, "I will learn this if you want me to. But I want you to know I'm going to hate it every day for the rest of my life."
So they would buy a car.
It was the kind of sentence other people said without thinking. In fifty-two years of marriage Arvel and Imogene Johnson had never once said it without thinking. They had bought four vehicles in their whole lives, every one of them used, every one of them paid for in cash out of the account at the credit union, every one of them driven until it died in a way that made a mechanic take his cap off. The S-10 they had bought in 2003 from a man in Whitesville whose son had joined the Army. Before that, a Plymouth. Before that, a Ford Fairlane that had once belonged to a funeral home.
Imogene, if you asked her, would tell you she wanted another used one. Something small, she would say. Something nobody else wanted. Something that wouldn't be a shame to scratch.
Arvel had not asked her. He had gone to the credit union on Monday by himself, in the S-10, in daylight, at a speed that caused a woman in a minivan to blow her horn at him on Parrish Avenue, and he had sat in the little glass office with the young man who handled their account and had the young man read him the balance out loud, because he could no longer make it out on the screen. Then he had asked the young man to make him a cashier's check. He had told the young man to make it out blank to the payee, which was not how it was done, and the young man had explained politely how it was done, and in the end they had settled on a different arrangement that Arvel did not entirely follow but that would let him pay for a car on Saturday.
Imogene Ruth Tuggle Johnson had never in her whole life owned anything new except her wedding ring and her teeth. Arvel intended to change that before the first of November.