Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

The Sunshine Cars USA showroom is a peach-colored concrete bunker, windowless on three sides with a large plate glass window facing the street. The exterior walls of the building and the window are decorated with signs that shout, We Work With Any Credit Type! and promise $1,000 Down — You Ride! The spiked fence runs behind the showroom from one corner of the building to the other like a corral for a hundred or more used cars, closing off half the block between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Streets. Every ten feet droops an American flag the size of a bedsheet waiting for an early evening offshore breeze.

Ventana stops in front of the big plate glass window and looks into the dimly lit showroom beyond. A very fat black man in a short-sleeved white guayabera shirt sits behind a desk reading a newspaper. A red-faced white man with a shaved head, wearing a black T-shirt and skinny jeans, talks into his cell phone. Multicolored tattoos swarm up and down his pink arms. Ventana has seen both men many times hanging around the showroom and sometimes strolling through the lot with potential buyers, and though she has never actually spoken with either man, she feels she knows them personally.

She likes the black man. She believes he’s more honest than the white man, who is probably the boss, and decides that she will buy her car from the black salesman, give him the commission, when suddenly a woman is standing beside her on the sidewalk. She’s a fawn-colored Hispanic girl half Ventana’s size and age. Her lips are puffed up from the injections that skinny white and Latina ladies think make them look sexy, but instead make them look like they got popped in the mouth by their bad boyfriend.

The girl smiles broadly as if she’s known Ventana since their school days together, although Ventana has never seen her before. She says, “Hi, there, missus. You want to drive away with a nice new car today? Or you still just window-shopping? I see you walk by almost every day, you know. Time you took a car out on a test drive, don’t you think?”

“You see me going past?”

“Sure. Ever since I started here I been seeing you. Time to stop lookin’, girl, time to start drivin’ your new car.”

“Not a new car. Used car. Pre-owned car.”

“Okay! That’s what we got at Sunshine Cars USA, guaranteed pre-owned cars! Certified and warranteed. Not new, okay, but like new! What you got in mind, missus? My name’s Tatiana, by the way.” The girl sticks out her hand.

Ventana shakes the hand gently — it’s small and cold. “I’m Ventana. Ventana Robertson. I only live two blocks off Seventh on Ninety-fifth, that’s why you been seeing me here before. On account of the bus stop at a hundred and third.” She doesn’t want the girl to think she’s already decided to buy herself a car today and is carrying the cash to do it. She doesn’t want to look like an easy sale. And she is hoping the fat black man will come out.

“Okay, Ventana! That’s great. Do you own your place on Ninety-fifth, or rent?”

“Own.”

“Okay. That’s perfect. Married? Live alone?”

“Divorced. Alone.”

“Okay, that’s wonderful, Ventana. And I know you have a steady job that you go to every morning and come home from every night, because I see you coming and going, and that’s very good, the steady job. So what’s your price range, Ventana? What can I fit you into today?”

“I’m thinking something like under thirty-five hundred dollars. But I’ll look around on my own for a while, thanks. The price tags, they on the cars?”

“Yes, they sure are! You just go ahead and kick the tires, Ventana. Check over on the far side of the lot, way in the back two rows. We’ve got a bunch of terrific vehicles right there in your price range. Will you be bringing us a trade?”

“Trade?”

“A car to trade up for the new one.”

“No.”

“Okay, that’s good too. We close at six, Ventana, but I’ll be inside if you have any questions or decide you want to take a test drive in one of our excellent vehicles. It’s still too hot out here for me. Don’t forget, we can work with any kind of credit type. There’s all kinds of arrangements for credit readily available through our own financing company. You have a Florida driver’s license, right?”

Ventana nods and walks calmly through the open gate into the lot as if she’s already bought and paid for her car, although her legs feel wobbly and she’s pretty sure she is trembling, but doesn’t want to look at her hands to find out. She knows she’s scared, but can’t name what she is scared of.

Tatiana watches her for a few seconds, wondering if she should follow her, the hell with the heat, then decides the woman isn’t really serious yet. She strolls back inside the showroom and reports that the woman is a long-term tire kicker, probably a month or more from signing away her firstborn, which makes the black man chuckle and the white man snort.

The black man checks his watch. “Yeah, well, she only got thirty minutes till we outa here.”

Tatiana says, “She’ll be back tomorrow. Early, I bet. The girl’s decided where she’s going to buy, now she just got to figure out what to buy.”

“How much she got to spend?” the black man asks.

“She’s sayin’ three-five. I’ll start her at five and work up from there.”

“Too low. The ’02 DeVille, start her with that. The bronze one. It’s listed at nine. Tell her she can drive it home for six. Fifty-nine ninety-nine. Sisters like her, they too old for the Grand Ams but still hot enough to want a Caddy. She got the three-five?”

“Prob’ly.”

“Gonna need financing. Forget the fucking Caddy. Go higher.”

“For sure.”

“Get her into the blue Beemer,” the white man says.

VENTANA MAKES HER WAY toward the cars in the far corner of the lot, as instructed. She walks quickly past and deliberately avoids looking at the nearly new cars that she knows she can’t afford. She doesn’t want her car, when she finds it, to appear shabby and old by comparison, not pre-owned but used. Used up.

When she gets to the far corner of the lot and walks past the cars that are supposed to be in her price range, most of them look used up. Rusted, scraped, dinged and dented, they seem ready for the junk heap, just this side of the cars sitting on cinder blocks or sinking into the weeds in the front yards of half the houses in her neighborhood, unsolvable mechanical problems waiting to be solved by the miraculous arrival of a pocketful of cash money from a lottery ticket payout, which will never come, and the vehicle will be finally sold for junk.

There is a black 2002 Honda Civic fastback that at first looks good to her, no dents or dings, no rust. The doors are locked, but when she squints against the glare and peers through the driver’s side window she can make out the numbers on the odometer—278,519. End of the line, for sure. The sign in the window says, Retail Price $4950, Special Offer $2950.

There is a blue 1999 Mercury Grand Marquis with half the teeth in its grille missing, bald tires, torn upholstery, trunk lid dented at the latch so she’ll have to tie it closed with wire to keep it from yawning open when she drives it to work. A sign taped to the driver’s-side window says, Retail Price $5950, Special Offer $2950.

Maybe she should go up a notch in price, she thinks. After all, even though they call it a “special offer,” it’s actually just an asking price, a number where negotiations can begin. That’s when she spots a light blue 2002 Dodge Neon with a big yellow sign on the windshield that cheerfully yells, Low Mileage!!! The retail price is $6,950, and the asking price is $3,950. If she offers $3,000, they might settle on $3,500.