By the time we got to the seller’s apartment, I was so fed up with public transportation I was ready to pay almost any price to get rolling again. The Red Line to Howard. The old Skokie Swift—now the Yellow Line—and then the real time–eater, the wait for the suburban bus to take us five miles further west, to a stop close enough to the guy’s place that we could walk.

“You know, if we don’t buy the car and take possession tonight, we may end up camping in that forest preserve we passed,” I told Mr. Contreras as we started walking. “The sign says the last bus leaves the Gross Point depot at nine–thirty, and it’s a quarter of now.”

“Cab.” He was puffing a little from the heat and the walk. “I’ll treat you to a cab back to the L, cookie.”

When we finally reached the seller’s apartment, we saw the car wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Rust over most of the driver’s door and around the trunk made it look depressing, the tires were worn, but a ten–mile drive to the airport and back didn’t reveal anything amiss in the engine. The seller was a kid who’d graduated from Champaign in engineering this spring. He bought the Skylark used when he started school, drove it hard for five years, and wanted to unload it now that he’d landed a real job with serious money. All the time we talked about his beater, he couldn’t stop looking at the Ford truck he’d bought to celebrate entering the job market at a hundred thousand a year. Without much real haggling we got the Skylark for twelve hundred.

Mr. Contreras overwhelmed me by pulling twenty carefully folded twenties from his inside pocket: “My contribution to the family car,” he insisted, when I tried to demur. I offered to let him drive home, but he refused.

“I don’t see so good at night anymore, cookie. Matter of fact, I been worrying about it some.”

“Then let’s get you to the doctor,” I said. “You can’t neglect your eyes. If you need new glasses or have cataracts or something, now’s the time to take care of them.”

“Don’t make me out to be an old man,” he snapped, locking the seat belt. “You’re as bad as Ruthie, wanting to push me into an old–age home. I can still see good enough to make out that gizmo you took from them girls on the street. What was it, anyway?”