All stories › Family Drama › Half a Tank › Episode 3
Rule Eight
Episode 3 of 3 of Half a Tank by Greg Sandoval · free to read
The log’s purpose column was blank three times, and Martin had read it twice before I got my door open.
There are three of us and one car, and it was our mother’s. We take it a week each, Martin, then me, then Kyle, and hand it over Saturdays at nine in the lot of a closed furniture store, under seven rules Martin wrote on a legal pad.
He sat behind the wheel with his knees up around it and the log against the horn.
“Wednesday, 31.6. Thursday, 30.9. Friday, 32.2,” he said. “Purpose, purpose, purpose.”
“I wrote those,” I said.
“On my week.”
“On your week,” I said.
“Doing what,” Martin said.
“Driving.”
“Purpose is a column, not a suggestion.” He held the log up like evidence. He had a typed sheet on the passenger seat. Of course he had a typed sheet. “Nine weeks. Six of them with a hundred and twenty-eight miles nobody wrote down. Nearly eight hundred miles on a car none of us can afford to fix, on insurance still in Mom’s name.”
Kyle stood by my car with his hands in his jacket and looked at the furniture store.
“The rota is the one thing in this family that works,” Martin said. “I’d like it to keep working.”
He unfolded himself out of the seat and put the key in my hand. “Keys. Log. Tank.”
“Tank’s over half,” I said.
“I know what the tank is.”
His wife had followed him in from Mom’s in his truck, the way she does every third Saturday, and he drove off in it, and the legal pad went with him in the glove box.
Monday at six Kyle came up my driveway on foot with the red bag over his shoulder. My week. My driveway. My key.
Rob opened the door. “The delivery man’s here for his car.”
I gave Kyle the key with the log clipped to it. “Log it,” I said. “All of it.”
“Purpose too?”
“It’s my week. I’m asking.”
He sat in the driver’s seat, which fit him, and wrote Monday and the start mileage. Then he stopped with the pen over the column. He wrote it small, in his own hand, the first time it had been written anywhere. Deliveries. Then he went back up the page and filled in my three blank lines the same way.
He came back at twenty to ten. Martin’s truck was in my driveway.
Martin had the title form on my kitchen table. It needs three signatures to move the car out of Mom’s name, and it lives in his glove box with the pad, and he had come to get mine. Kyle stood in the doorway with the bag on his shoulder and the log in his hand.
He put the log on the table, open. Four lines. Deliveries, deliveries, deliveries, deliveries.
Martin read it. He read it again.
“Since when,” Martin said.
“February,” Kyle said.
“Mom was alive in February,” Martin said.
“Mom sewed the bag.” Kyle turned the strap over. Green stitches, small and even. Martin looked at them and then put two fingers on the top button of his own coat, sewn on in the same green.
“Rule six is the insurance,” he said.
“I know.”
“If you hit somebody,” Martin said.
“I know.”
“The rent on the room.”
“Covers the rent,” Kyle said. “And the phone.”
Martin looked at the title form for a while. “You had the yard.”
“The yard closed in January. I was here. Somebody was here.”
“You could have said so at the lot,” Martin said.
“You had the pen.”
Martin got up and went out to his truck for the pad, and he was out there longer than a glove box takes. When he came in, his glasses were in his coat pocket, and he wrote without them, in pen, in block capitals, all three of us present.
Rule eight. Weeknights are Kyle’s, every week. Rent on the room is struck. Call the agent Monday about business use, cost split three ways.
“That’s three rules,” Kyle said.
“It’s one rule with parts,” Martin said.
He slid the title form across the table. Kyle signed under Martin’s name and I signed under Kyle’s, and the car belonged to the three of us on paper, which it had all along.
He capped the pen. Then he went out to the driveway, because he is Martin, and looked at the gas needle through the window, and came back in. It was a hair under.
“Half,” Martin said.