This morning, early, I swept out my home garage, rolled the box to the front, hung a little sign my granddaughter painted over the door, opened it to the street, and by noon there were nine vehicles in my driveway and out along the ditch.
The sign says TIRES. She is eleven and she put a snowflake on it.
I am not running a shop. What I have is a bead breaker, a manual changer my father bought in 1968, a compressor, and thirty-three years of knowing which widow in this town is driving on cords.
I called them. Same as every October. Bill says come in, there was a deal.
There was never a deal and there is not one now. I charge them what the tire costs me and not a dollar over, and I have had four arguments about that and won all four.
The storm came off the Bighorns about eight last night. Fourteen inches and it drifted, and CY Avenue was a mess by six.
Now the part I have not told anybody but my wife.
Bill wrote his own obituary. He did it in 2019 after the first stroke, typed it with two fingers, and put it in the envelope with the insurance papers, and his daughter ran it in June exactly the way he wrote it.
Everybody read the first half. Born in Casper, married Doreen, the shop, the grandkids.
Down past the survivors there is a paragraph the funeral home tried to talk her out of, because it costs by the line.
The tire business in this town was never mine alone. Dwayne Ostrander has worked in my building since 1992 and has been the reason for most of what people say about me. If anybody wants to do something for me, do not send flowers. Send them to him and let him square it later, which he will, because that is how he is built and I never once had to explain it to him.
Tanner did not read the whole obituary. His mother told me that at the funeral.
He came to my garage at one this morning in the middle of that storm. Two green kids in the bays, a lot full of trucks, and a woman on the phone stuck out past Bar Nunn with two kids in the car.
I went. Took my chains and went with him, and we got her out at three fifteen, and I did not say one word to that boy about anything.
He sat in my garage at seven with a cup of coffee and cried, which I did not want and could not stop.
We are working it out. The way it looks now, I run the service side out of his building three days a week, on paper, with my name on the door under Bill’s, and he runs the books, which he is good at.
The garage stays open Saturdays. He has quit trying on that.
He called goodwill a thing that does not show up on a spreadsheet. His grandfather knew that, which is why he did not put it on one. He put it in his own obituary, where a boy who would not read past the survivors was never going to find it.