He sold me my first car

The boy's been on the counter four Saturdays now. He's better at the screen protectors than I am. No bubbles, and he doesn't use the little plastic frame that comes in the box, he lines it up by eye.

He's seventeen. He says salaam when he comes in and after that he's quiet unless a customer needs something, and then he's polite the way a boy is polite when his father has told him he will be.

He's got his father's hands. Long fingers. That's useful in this work.

I bought my first car off his father. Fourteen hundred dollars, cash, in November of 2013. A green Camry, a 2001, a hundred and ninety-one thousand on the clock.

I'd been in the country fourteen months. I had a license from the state, but a license here doesn't teach you anything. They test you in a parking lot and on a residential street with two stop signs. Nobody puts you on a freeway. So the car sat in the alley behind my cousin's building and I kept taking the 21 to work.

He said he'd show me. He gave me two Saturdays.

We did 62 first, the Crosstown, going west from Portland, because west of 35W it stays wide and people behave themselves. Then he put me in the commons, where 62 and 35W run together for about a mile and a half. That's the part you have to learn. You've got traffic coming on from Lyndale and traffic trying to get over for the 35W south exit. The 46th Street exit is on the left. Nobody ever tells you there are left exits in this city.

The second Saturday was 35W north through the tunnel and then the 94 split. If you're in the wrong lane at the split you're going to St. Paul and there's nothing you can do about it. He had me take it four times. Off at 31st, back up at 35th. He never raised his voice at me, not once, and I was bad at it for a while.

Afterwards we'd sit in the lot behind the Holiday on Lake, because the heat in that car was only any good with the engine going.

That second Saturday we sat there a lot longer than we needed to, and it started there. The rear passenger window went down about four inches and then stopped, and he told me that before I paid him, which he didn't have to do. There was a cigarette burn on the front edge of the passenger seat. The heater core went two winters later and a place on 38th did it for ninety dollars less than he said it would cost. I kept it until 2019 and then gave it to my wife's brother for nothing.

That was twelve years ago. It hasn't been steady. Some years it was twice. There was a year and a half when it wasn't at all, and I never asked him about that and he never explained it.

He sends me cars. That's how it goes. A link to a Sienna out in Brooklyn Park, or an Escape somebody's selling for their mother, and a line about the price. Half the time it's only a car.

He's at the depot on the east side, nights, four tens. His cousins call him Dheere because he's six foot six and he's been thin his whole life. Nobody at the depot has ever heard that name. I've heard maybe six people say it out loud, and I say it about once a year.

We're in the same row on Fridays. Third from the front, on the right. His wife knows my wife, and our kids have been at some of the same weddings. There are four or five men in that room with my name.

Last month my brother Maxamed put the boy on the counter. He didn't ask me first. He's got two-thirds of the shop. I've got the other third, and he's older than me, so there were two reasons he didn't have to. Now he's talking about the boy staying on properly after graduation, or else about buying me out, which he first brought up in February. He keeps the number written on a card in the drawer with the warranty slips.

I drive a medical transport van, so the shop is Saturdays and two evenings. There's about six feet between the counter and the bench where I work on the boards.

I stopped answering for three weeks. He sent me a Camry in Fridley, a 2011, one owner, and it was honestly a good listing, and I let it sit.

Then my brother came in on a Tuesday. A battery on a Galaxy, which is fifteen minutes. Maxamed was at the front, so he came down the back hallway to where I was. That hallway isn't wide. He has to turn his shoulders to get down it. He's always had to.

He said the boy's good with his hands. I said he is. Then he asked me how long the Crosstown's taking in the afternoon now, with the work at Penn. I told him about the backup that starts up by Xerxes around ten past four. I told him it's clear again by twenty to six, and that he's better off on 494 anyway if he's going past Richfield. He's driven that road his whole life.

He put his phone in his shirt pocket and said the glass was better than the place by his house does it. Then he went out the front and said salaam to my brother.

I had a run at two, a woman on Portland who goes for dialysis three days a week. I had her there ten minutes early and I sat in the van in the lot with it running.

Friday I was in the row. He was six or seven men down. Afterwards the boys were standing around by the shoe racks the way they do, and his oldest had my daughter's shoes in his hand because she'd left them, and he gave them to me.

My mother calls from Columbus on Saturdays, around eleven our time. This Saturday I had the back off a Pixel with both hands in it and the phone was on the counter by the boy. He looked at the screen and said it's your mom, and then he put it against the side of my head and held it there.

She asked me in Somali whether I'm eating. She asks that every week and I always say yes. She asked again and I said yes again.

He looked at the counter. I got a hand free and took it off him.

That night my wife had the girl's hair half done and asked me if the freezer's still making that noise. I said I'd look at it. She said not to bother, her cousin knows somebody.