I walked into the middle of that lot, past the flags and the balloons and the radio station out front, in my clean shirt.
The salesman saw me and put on his blank face, same as the day he sold me a death trap and wished me a blessed day.
I did not cuss him out. I set a folder on the step of the nearest motorhome.
He had told me it was AS-IS. But he had also sold it to me as fully rebuilt, and those two things cannot both be true.
You sold me the words fully rebuilt, I said, and then the brakes failed coming down a grade with my wife beside me, so either you never rebuilt a thing, or you rebuilt it to kill us, and the law does not forgive either one.
Fully rebuilt is a promise, an express warranty, and it overrides any AS-IS sticker in this state. But brakes are more than a promise. Brakes are a safety matter, and selling a rig with brakes that fail on a grade is not a business dispute. It is a danger to every soul on the road.
I had a mechanic report showing the brakes had never been touched, and I had already carried the whole folder to the state motor vehicle board and to the highway safety office, both of which take a dim view of death traps sold as rebuilt.
The radio was live twenty feet away, and when they heard how a family nearly went off a mountain in something sold as fully rebuilt, they put a microphone in my hand.
A blowout grand opening blows out fast under that kind of truth.
The dealer refunded my sixteen thousand dollars rather than answer to two state offices at once, and the board opened a file that outlasted my part in it.
I bought a solid used motorhome from an honest dealer who had every system inspected and handed me the paperwork to prove it.
My wife and I took our long trip after all, slow and easy on her knees, the brakes sure under us the whole way down every hill.
We made it out to the coast and back, my wife and I, the trip we had put off one year too many. Her knees ached and the coffee was bad and one night it rained sideways, and it was the finest week we have had in a long time.
I think about how close that first grade came to ending us, and how easy it would have been to say fair enough and swallow it, the way a tired old man is meant to. I did not swallow it. And because I did not, we got our week by the water.
I did not raise my voice. I stayed level, the way I told that salesman I would. Level got my money back and got a death trap off the road.
Have a blessed day, I told him. I meant it about as much as he ever did.