“But you're going to go buy it?”

Jane put her head in her hands. "I'm afraid so. I'm dreading it.”

Shelley's eyes sparkled. "Oh, it could be fun."

“Fun? Are you crazy?”

Shelley grinned. "A feather in my cap. I've never made a car salesman cry. Yet.”

2

The salesman didn't cry. But he didn't have much fun, either.

Jane's honorary Uncle Jim, a tough old Chicago cop who had been friends with her parents since before Jane was born, had reported that Mike's dream vehicle was a smallish black pickup truck. Though this hadn't crossed Jane's mind as a possibility, she quickly came to like the idea. It would allow her son to haul his belongings back and forth to college without involving her or her station wagon in long highway drives.

“Best of all, Shelley, there's no backseat," Jane told Shelley.

“What difference does that make?"

“Girls, Shelley. Girls and backseats can be a dangerous combination."

“Oh, right. Hormones and lust and dark nights on country roads. I'd almost forgotten all that.”

On Shelley's orders, they stopped at the library and quickly copied a bunch of pages from various auto magazines and Consumer Reports and piled back into Jane's car. Shelley skimmed the copied pages, crumpled and dog-eared them a bit, then laid them aside. "Aren't you going to read all that? Why did we copy it otherwise?"

“I read the one I needed to, the one about prices. The others are just to wave around and make it look like I've really studied the market and know what I'm doing," Shelley said confidently.

At first, the salesman was patronizing, calling them "ma'am," with a faint sneer. But after a few minutes with Shelley and her sheaf of papers, he became a little more respectful, switching to a state of vague alarm, and finally something that looked like panic. After twenty minutes, Shelley named a ridiculously low figure that she said was all they were prepared to pay. He laughed nervously. "I can't do that, ma'am."