Our mechanic at the Firestone was a boy named Noel. He might have been twenty but probably not. He had a wispy goatee and was prone to sighing and excessive blinking. When he opened his mouth, strings of saliva connected his top teeth to his bottom and he stumbled on his words. He also couldn’t fix the car.

He brought us under the car and pointed to a lot of different parts with names I can’t remember. It was a drive shaft seal that had gone on us, allowing all the transmission fluid to leak out. “It’s leaking so bad,” he said, “you’d have to one of you drive while the other a you sits on the hood and pours in fluid, that’s how bad it’s leaking.”

Probably the transmission was screwed too, Noel said. If it were him he’d go to the Pick ‘n Pull and find a new seal and then he’d fix it himself, but that’s him and he knows cars and he’s got all his own tools. He looked at us doubtfully. It could take days to order that seal, heck, they’d probably have to get it from the dealership, and then, here he lowered his voice, they’d charge 97 dollars an hour and who knows how long it would take and then you still wouldn’t know about the transmission.

I asked the question. “Do you freelance?”

“Firestone, they frown on that. They don’t like it when we do that.” He shifted from side to side and looked up at the bottom of the car. He grimaced and hummed to himself. I realized I was getting transmission fluid in my hair.

Macky and I conferred briefly and decided that if we were going to scrap the car and start hitch-hiking we were going to do so on full stomachs. We left the car with Noel and headed out in search of food. Suburban Kansas city is not a pedestrian friendly place so this involved a lot of darting across six-lane interstates and crawling over pylons. We didn’t find food but we did find an Auto Zone Store that happened to have the seal we needed. We bought the seal and brought it back to Noel, who seemed confused but agreed to put it in.

We ate some bagels and were, for a very brief period, optimistic. (Looking back on it, this entire adventure was characterized by spurts of short-lived optimism.) Noel and his boss, Charlie, herded us back into the garage. They had bad news. It wasn’t the seal after all, but rather the U-joint, or something like that. They couldn’t fix the car. We would have to be towed to a transmission place. We would have to spend another night in BF-Kansas.

And that’s how we ended up at a place called Certified Transmission in another strip mall suburb of Kansas City with no crosswalks and no sidewalks and no food. They couldn’t fix the car there either. They took the plate off the transmission and showed us all the metal flakes that had collected in the pan (probably a result of me driving 80 mph with no transmission fluid but we didn’t talk about that). A new transmission would cost $3000. Jim, who owned the place, was blunt: “With that car, it’s not worth it. If it were my car, I wouldn’t do it.” When someone thinks something is such a bad idea that they would rather you not pay them $3000 it must be a pretty bad idea.

And so we walked around the block a few times before sucking it up, eating shitty Chinese food and calling a rental car company. At some point during this process I had developed a hacking cough, a sore throat and what was probably a decently high fever. I curled into the uncomfortable waiting room chair and contemplated death while Macky argued with Budget and Hertz. They didn’t do point-to-point rentals. They only did point-to-point rentals at their airport location, please hold, please hold more, it seems that the airport location is all out of point-to-point rentals, have a nice day, etc. Eventually he figured something out and this is when we met Roy.

Roy felt sorry for us, which, on reflection, shouldn’t have been all that surprising. He was waiting on his truck to get a new transmission, but he could take us to the rental car place in his other truck, which was right outside. He owned a farm 20 minutes outside of the city. He was a large guy, with a beer belly that was accentuated by his outfit; Roy was wearing stained white overalls that ended a few inches before his boots began. Numerous holes in the overalls revealed bright red long underwear. We liked him instantly.

He told us about the time he was in Pennsylvania with his wife and their car died and they tried to rent a car. “They wouldn’t let me because I didn’t have a credit card,” he grumbled. “I’ve never had a credit card. I’m old fashioned like that. So I had to leave them fifteen hundred in cash.” I mentioned that we have lots of credit cards but no cash and he laughed and slapped his knee.

When we got to the rental car place, Roy followed us in, saying something about wanting “to make sure ya’ll get set.” He hovered awkwardly while we signed the paperwork and picked up the keys and he waited in his truck to confirm that our new ride would actually start. It felt parental. It felt nice.

We had decided to pay twenty dollars extra to avoid having to cram all of our stuff into a subcompact, and apparently the next step up was a massive, shiny black, gangster-style Jeep Liberty. Admittedly there is something to be said for so much leg room, but the car made us feel very unlike ourselves. I had to swallow the instinct to post an apologetic sign on the rear window, something along the lines of “In real life, I’m an environmentalist, I promise.”

And so we junked the Subaru for $500 dollars and headed westward. It was four pm and we had ten hours of Kansas in between us and Colorado Springs. And this is the part where I owe Macky a gigantic tribute because he drove the entire way while I sat in the passenger seat in a feverish haze only communicating to moan about how much my throat/head/insert-body-part-here hurt. We ate at an I-HOP where I deliriously befriended the young couple sitting in the booth next to us and proceeded to tell them the entire saga. They were impressed. “I’m miserable when I have to drive to Denver. You guys are amazing,” the guy said. This helped a little bit.

THE END PART 2. Stay tuned for part three: car shopping in Colorado Springs, tacos and other adventures in logistics.