They Gave My Cousin a Car, I Built an Empire novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: The Civic
I sold my Civic on Monday morning for forty-eight hundred dollars.
The man at the used lot walked around it twice, kicked a tire, and wrote the check slowly.
"Clean car," he said. "Why are you selling?"
"I need nineteen hundred dollars by Thursday."
"Most people say they need a bigger car."
"I need a pallet of dog food."
He looked up.
"Hey, aren't you the Kreutzer girl? The lottery guy's daughter? I saw him on Channel 7."
"That's my dad."
"So why don't you just ask him?"
"I did."
He didn't say anything else.
He counted the check twice, and I signed the title with a pen on a chain.
Ben picked me up at the curb in his truck.
"Four thousand eight hundred," I said, and handed him the check. "That covers the pallet and gives us a week of rent."
"Vic, you loved that car."
"It had a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it."
"You named it."
"I named it Gerald. Don't make this a thing."
He drove us to the bank with both hands on the wheel and didn't say anything for a whole mile, which for Ben is a speech.
On Tuesday, the pallet came.
We stacked bags of kibble up the back wall and stood there looking at them.
On Wednesday, a woman walked in wearing a faded rescue-league sweatshirt, with a clipboard and a dog-hair-covered knee.
She was the coordinator for a shelter network that placed about two hundred dogs a year.
"Do you deliver?" she asked.
"We can," Ben said, before I could blink.
"I need three hundred pounds of puppy food every week to four foster homes. Different addresses, all over Montgomery County."
"Why not buy it across the street?" I asked. "They have a bigger store."
"I asked them first." She tucked the clipboard under her arm. "They said they don't do deliveries and they don't do orders under two thousand dollars."
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