The dad is test driving a truck from a used car dealership in order to pick up a refrigerator he found on Craigslist.
He tells the salesman, “I need to show it to my wife,” and takes the keys and revs the engine and he flashes the grin he saves special for when he’s fucking someone over.
The salesman smiles back and it’s the same kind of smile. Practiced. The muscles taut. A smile built for marathons.
They’re having themselves a little smile off through the truck’s open window, smiling and smiling, until the son climbs into the passenger seat and the dad shoots a wink at the salesman. A nice clean wink. It’s such a good wink that the salesman’s smile flickers. One little twitch, like the wink smacked him in the lips. And right that moment, just as the salesman is reeling, the dad pulls out of the lot with a tap of the horn and he’s laughing his hacking laugh and the son can’t help but laugh too.
The dad fiddles with the radio and a song comes on and it’s Bob Seger and the dad says, “Oh HELL YEAH!” and he has his arm out the window and he’s slapping the side of the truck and he’s singing it hard as shit. The son doesn’t know the song but he’s got his arm out the window and he’s slapping the side of the truck and by the end he’s singing right along. Air guitaring. Rocking out.
“Show ‘em how to do it boy! Yeah! HELL YEAH!”
The house with the refrigerator is kind of shitty and the truck bounces while backing into the crumbling asphalt driveway.
“Nice suspension on this baby,” says the dad. “Yessir.”
They back to the garage and the seller comes outside and he looks sleepy and bored. The dad slowly circles the refrigerator, asking all sorts of questions the seller has no interest in answering. The seller doesn’t seem like he cares at all. “It came with the house,” is pretty much the only answer he’s willing to give.
The dad rummages through the freezer and starts pulling apart the icemaker and the seller shifts and checks his phone twice then finally says, “So. You gonna buy it or what?”
“What about the freeze guard?” says the dad, poking his head back out. “I don’t see it here.”
The dad says it’s not too big a deal, except when he looked up the refrigerator online it said the freeze guard generally came standard with this particular model, and although it isn’t technically necessary, he was banking on it a little bit.
“You know how it is,” says the dad, smiling that twinkle twinkle smile of his. “You get excited.”
The seller doesn’t argue, just shrugs and takes a couple bucks off, even tosses in a heavy duty tarp to lay out in the truck bed. Money is exchanged without a handshake.
They look from the fridge to the truck and say things like, “How about we…” and “What do you think…” then decide to just slide the thing on its side and they heave and they haw and they get that sucker in the truck.
It’s harder to get the refrigerator off at home. The son is just a boy. The dad climbs up onto the truck bed and rocks the fridge until about a third of it is hanging off the back edge then tells the boy to hop on up. He tells the boy to get in the space between the cab of the truck and the refrigerator.
He says, “Yeah, hold your legs like that. Be ready to push. And push hard.”
The dad gets down and tries a couple different grips then settles on one and yells, “Push!”
The son pushes and he’s clamping his jaw and turning red and the dad is clamping his jaw and turning red and they heave and they haw and they get that sucker off the truck.
The dad’s grip slips just as the refrigerator touches the ground and it tilts sideways and he says, “Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!” and scrambles to catch it against his thigh.
“Shit, boy,” he says, breathing hard and beaming. “Any harder you woulda pushed her right through the damn kitchen.”
They leave it there in the driveway and head back to the used car dealership. The salesman greets the dad with his sucker’s smile and starts going on about how nice the truck is and that even he’s surprised at the low price.
The dad lifts his palm to quiet the salesman. “Hold up,” he says. “My wife didn’t like it.”
The used car salesman says there might be room for flexibility and to just let him talk to his boss but the dad cuts him off again.
“Buddy,” he says, pulling out his grin. “She says it’s a piece of shit.”
Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside Buffalo NY. His debut novel, Lazy Suicide is available on Back Patio Press.