The Locksmith's Van

I'm twenty-eight years old and I coach women's basketball at a small college outside of Charleston, which means I spend about four months a year living out of a van, and the other eight months defending the van to people who think a grown woman should drive something with fewer crumbs in it. The van is a 2011 Honda Odyssey, white, one hubcap missing, and it has carried me to more gyms in more hollows than I can count. I love it. My sister calls it the Crime Scene, but she drives a leased sedan, so her opinion is legally void.

This particular trip was a scouting run. There's a player up in Millbrook, way out in the Appalachian foothills, some junior college sophomore named Dominique with a vertical leap that supposedly violates several laws of physics, and my athletic director wanted eyes on her before we started throwing scholarship money around. Fine, I said, I'll go, I like driving, I like podcasts, I like the part of the state where the radio gives up and the mountains just sit there being enormous at you. What I did not plan for, what no one plans for, was the tire.

Here is how it happened. I had been on Route 7 for about an hour, following the GPS's increasingly desperate instructions, when I decided I needed a bathroom and a coffee in roughly that order. There was a gas station with a diner attached, the kind of place where the coffee is a formality and the pie is a religion, and next to it sat a feed store with a gravel parking lot full of pickup trucks. I pulled in, bought coffee, used the bathroom, got back in the van, and made it maybe forty feet across the gravel before the whole front end dropped and made a sound like a wheelbarrow full of forks going down a staircase.

* * *

I got out and looked, the way looking ever helps. The front passenger tire was flat. Not slow-flat, not we-should-get-that-checked-flat, but dead, sitting on its rim like it had fainted. I opened the back hatch and pulled up the floor mat where a spare tire lives in every vehicle I have ever owned, and found, instead of a tire, a cooler, two duffel bags, a box of practice jerseys, and a traffic cone I have no memory of acquiring.

"So the previous owner," I said out loud, to the van, to the parking lot, to a disinterested crow on the light pole, "just took it. Just took the spare and left the cone. As a joke. As a little gift."

The crow said nothing useful. I checked the manual, which confirmed that my model, in its wisdom, shipped with a tire repair kit instead of a spare, and the repair kit was a can of foam that would have helped exactly none, because the sidewall had a gash in it you could park a bicycle in. I got on the phone with my roadside assistance people, who told me a tow truck could be there in, and I quote, "somewhere between ninety minutes and four hours," because apparently the mountains eat tow trucks and they only send them out in threes.

I sat down on my back bumper and did the math. It was two in the afternoon. I had a hotel booked in Millbrook, sixty miles up, and a scrimmage to watch at nine tomorrow morning. Ninety minutes to four hours was survivable, barely, if I treated it as forced relaxation, which I am famously bad at. My college roommate once described me as someone who considers sitting still a competitive event she is losing. She was not wrong. I lasted about eight minutes on that bumper, watching dust devils wander across the feed store lot, before I got up and paced, and while I was pacing, a van pulled in.

It was a white panel van with a magnetic sign on the door that said CARR LOCK & KEY, and the man who climbed out of it was tall, somewhere around thirty, with the kind of neat short haircut you either get in the military or from a barber who has opinions. He was wearing a work shirt with his name embroidered over the pocket, ROBBY, and when he saw me standing there next to my clearly wounded van, he slowed down mid-stride, the way people do when they're deciding whether getting involved is worth it.

"You need a hand?" he called. "Saw you from the road. Looked like you were either fixing that tire or negotiating with it."

"Negotiating," I said. "The tire's refusing all offers. I'm Iris."

"Robby." He came closer and gave the flat a professional look, hands in his pockets. "That's a sidewall. No patch, no foam, no hope. You got a spare under there?"

"That's the beautiful part. There's a slot for one and a cooler where the tire should be. Previous owner kept the spare and left me a traffic cone, which I choose to read as a message from the universe."

He laughed, an actual laugh, not a polite one. "That's a new one. I've seen people keep jumper cables out of a car, but the spare's a first." He squatted down by the wheel anyway, like he needed to verify my tragedy in person, and then stood and dusted off his hands. "Yeah, that's done. Where's your tow taking you?"

"Millbrook, eventually. Ninety minutes to four hours, which is a range I find inspiring."

"Millbrook's an hour north. I'm headed through there tonight anyway, work thing." He hesitated, and I watched him do the small arithmetic people do when they're deciding how helpful to be without being weird about it. "Look, I'm not gonna leave you sitting in a feed store lot for four hours. I can give you a lift into town, you get a motel, the tow follows you whenever it shows up. I'll even help you deal with the van in the morning, there's a garage guy in Millbrook who owes me."

"Why does a garage guy owe a locksmith?" I asked, and then immediately thought it was a strange question, but he just shrugged.

"Because he locked himself out of his own truck twice in one year, and both times it was me who had to drive out and feel superior about it." He glanced at his watch. "I've got a locksmith job in Millbrook at four, so the timing actually works. You'd be stuck back here till dark otherwise. That gas station closes at six and the diner closes when the pie runs out, which is a separate tragedy."

It was, I will admit, a slightly insane thing to do, getting into a stranger's van in the middle of nowhere. I did the full risk assessment, standing there with my coffee, everything I owned in a van with a flat tire. He was in a marked work van with a phone number on the side and a shirt with his name on it, which is not a guarantee of anything but is more accountability than most strangers offer, and honestly the alternative was four hours of dust devils and that crow. I texted my sister the van's plate number and the name on the sign, because I am paranoid, not stupid, and then I grabbed my duffel and my laptop bag and locked the Crime Scene.

"I really appreciate this," I said, climbing into the passenger seat, which smelled like metal shavings and, faintly, like somebody's lunch from about a week ago. "You're either a good Samaritan or a very elaborate crime."

"If I were a very elaborate crime," Robby said, pulling out onto Route 7, "I'd have a better van. Look at this thing. There's a key blank stuck in the seat upholstery. You can't frighten anyone with this van."

He had a point. The van, on closer inspection, was chaos, a rolling hardware store with a clipboard wedged against the dashboard and a cup of pens that was mostly keys. He drove like someone who drives for a living, calm and about four miles under the limit, and he asked where I was headed and I told him about the scouting trip and the player with the vertical leap, and he asked actual follow-up questions, which put him ahead of most people I meet at parties.

"So what's the work thing in Millbrook?" I asked. "Besides making garage guys feel grateful."

"The conference starts tomorrow. Today I've got a locksmith job at four." He said it the way people say things they are dreading. "I do parole work. Up in the city, usually. This one's down here, which my boss thinks is convenient for me and which I think is a coincidence the universe arranged as a punishment."

"A parole officer who does locksmithing on the side?"

"No, the van's the family business, sort of. My dad ran Carr Lock and Key for thirty years. I do the locks on weekends because I like it, and because it's the one job where nobody yells at me." He glanced over. "What about you, coaching, that's the whole dream or the whole accident?"

"Bit of both," I said, and outside the window the mountains went on being enormous at us, and I settled back into the seat and figured that whatever the universe had arranged for me in Millbrook, at least it came with decent conversation.

The job at four turned out to be a nervous man in a housecoat who had locked himself out of his own kitchen, which Robby handled in about six minutes flat while I sat on the porch steps of a stranger's house in Millbrook feeling like a golden retriever waiting outside a grocery store, and then it was past five and the light was going amber over the church fairgrounds when Robby pulled into the gravel lot of the Pine Rest Motel, which was less a motel and more a single long building with a neon vacancy sign that flickered like it was making a decision.

"Please tell me that sign is lying," I said, and Robby said nothing, which was answer enough.

Inside, the clerk was a woman of about sixty with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she tapped at a keyboard with one finger and informed us, with the grim satisfaction of someone who delivers bad news professionally, that they had exactly one room left. One room, one bed, and apparently a fold-out couch situation of unknown quality, because the Pine Rest did not believe in overselling its product.

"Conference," Robby explained to her, wearily. "There's two hundred parole officers in town for the fairgrounds thing."

"That'll do it," the clerk agreed, and quoted a price that made me miss my original hotel booking, which, I had just learned from a voicemail, had been given away to the conference crowd.

I was doing the math in my head, the math where I sleep on a fold-out couch in a stranger's room and feel awkward until the tow truck comes at some unholy hour, when the door opened behind us and a woman came in carrying a conference tote bag and the general air of someone who had already been to the