Approx

Approx. 1,507 words

IT TAKES WHAT IT TAKES

Robin Flinchum

On the 23rd day of May, almost precisely at 4:15 in the afternoon, Lucille Pratt received the mechanic’s bill. It was unfortunate she should have to confront such a thing so late in the day, for by that time she was already cranky and restless. Long hours in the stuffy waiting room, where the edges of every magazine were drab with the fluids and chemicals that ebbed in from the garage had only added to her anxiety over the fate of her beloved motor home.

What in hell could Fulton have been thinking when he allowed himself to succumb to such a thing as cancer and left her stranded alone in a dream they had dreamed together? Hadn’t she waited 45 years for this time, when it would be just the two of them traveling the country in the old family RV? Two of them; not just one of them. It made her tired just to think of it, and here was a repair bill, at two hundred dollars beyond her budget for the month.

“How do you want to pay for that, ma’am?” the mechanic asked. He was tall, burly and smelled of motor oil as he stood behind the grease-streaked counter, attempting to pretend that he waited patiently, but she knew his foot was tapping the concrete floor on the other side of the partition. She was sixty-seven years old–sad, tired, and perhaps a bit slow moving, but she was not deaf. Lucille set the bill down on the counter with slow deliberation and rummaged in her handbag for her glasses.

Her inspection of the bill was lengthy and minute.

“Why have you charged so much for labor?” she asked at last. The mechanic sighed impatiently, all pretenses gone.

“It takes the time it takes to get the work done,” he answered.

Lucille looked over the bill again. “These shock absorbers you replaced,” she pointed to an item on the bill. “They were less than a year old.”

“I can’t help that,” the mechanic answered. “These things happen. Is this going to be cash or charge?”

Lucille sniffed pointedly and reached into her handbag for her wallet. She felt sure in her bones that he had done more work than needed and had charged her for more labor than the job required. If Fulton were alive, of course, he would handle it. No mechanic had ever dared to try taking advantage of her husband, who walked into any garage as if he owned the place and spoke to the mechanics as if they were his own employees.

The mechanic processed her credit card and waited for her signature. There were no more words spoken, as there was nothing left to say. Small talk seemed pointless between a robber and his victim.

When it was over at last Lucille was grateful to be back in the motor home and she spent a few minutes puttering about removing the grease shield the mechanic had placed under the floor pedals; readjusting the seat and the rearview mirror; calming her temper before she attempted to guide the 30 foot rig into traffic. While she sat idly in the driver’s seat, she saw the mechanic emerge from the shop. He dashed–as much as a large man can do such a thing–over to a dark blue Dodge pickup truck parked at the back of the lot, where he unlocked the door, reached in for a magazine, then re-locked the door and headed back inside.

After he had gone, Lucille sat still for a moment, staring at the truck. It was a recent model and obviously well cared for–the paint bright and not a mark on it, the chrome shined to sparkling.

When Lucille’s large, awkward motor home backed into the mechanic’s truck, she hardly felt the impact. However, for an exhilarating moment, she could feel from the bottom of her spine to the roots of her hair, she could have been unaware that it had happened at all. She pulled forward a bit, as if she could not quite negotiate the turn, and then backed into the truck again. In her rearview-mirror, she could see that the damage was superficial, but it was enough to satisfy.

When the mechanic came running from the shop again, yelling up at her window, Lucille poked her head out. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have such a hard time with this thing since my husband died. But it takes what it takes to make these turns.” She smiled brightly.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the mechanic cried, both hands flung up in the air. “You’ve crushed my front end.”

“I can’t help that,” Lucille answered, “these things happen.” She smiled as sweetly as she knew how. She rummaged in her purse again and came up with a small white business card. “Here,” she said, flinging the card out the window. “That’s my insurance company; you just give them a call.”

As the card fluttered down toward the pavement and landed at the feet of the now speechless mechanic, Lucille drove out of the parking lot with her window open, feeling the air on her flushed face and the pounding of her heart. “Ha, ha!” she yelled into the hot afternoon. “Ha, ha!”

If no one but Lucille and the hapless mechanic had witnessed this event, it might have been the last of her attempts to seek justice in an unjust world. In the evening, when Lucille had settled herself at a pleasant RV park only a hundred miles from that mechanic’s garage, she found herself situated next to another widow named Tess. Tess had set out her lawn chair to watch the sunset at nearly the same time as Lucille. Naturally, in the way of RV parks and of basic human nature, the two women fell into conversation.

“You know, honey,” the other woman said, leaning closer, “I know how you got those dents in the back of your rig. I saw you at the garage today.”

“You did?” Lucille found herself torn between equal measures of pride and guilt.

“I did,” the woman nodded, her short white hair shifting slightly in the evening breeze. “I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to stand up and cheer. That man’s taken me for money before, and I’m not the only one. You know his is the only shop on this road for a long way in either direction. A lot of the girls in the Merry Widows club have been cheated by him.”

“The Merry Widows,” asked Lucille?

“It’s an RV club for us single gals trying to make it out here without our husbands. It’s hard learning the ropes by your self after he goes. Most women give up their RV’s and go back to house living, but the die-hards like us don’t want to give up our rigs. So, we band together and help each other out. Watching you today gave me an idea.”

Lucille leaned forward in her chair and for the first time since Fulton died felt a strange surge of power inside her. “Go on,” she encouraged her new friend.

“Well, I say we form a syndicate. From now on, we’re not going to take that kind of treatment. We’re old women with good insurance in huge vehicles that can do a lot of damage. I think that makes us a force to be reckoned with as long as we stop acting like rabbits, don’t you?”

“I do!” Lucille answered brightly. “I certainly do.”

Within a week of their meeting, Lucille and her new friend had called a congress of the Merry Widows and all the girls within a thousand mile radius converged on the small RV park designated as headquarters for the syndicate. The Merry Widows Equalizing Task Force formally structured under the bylaws of the group and Lucille, as president of the task force, was chosen to instruct the girls in how to put the power and size of their motor homes to work for them, rather than against them. Each member of the club received a supply of prettily decorated cards and a neat little holder to store them somewhere near the driver-side window of her rig. On one side of the card, the holder was to fill in her insurance information. On the other was a neatly printed message: ‘On behalf of the Merry Widows Equalizing Task Force, we hope you will think twice before you cheat another one of our girls’.

By the 23rd of June Lucille Pratt was no longer living her dream alone. With her packet of cards on the dashboard to the left of the steering wheel, a small portrait of Fulton attached on the right, and often a caravan of Merry Widows on the road behind her, she went forth into the world anew and almost never remembered to feel tired again.

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