She had asked me. And I had said yes, because she was my sister and I hadn’t yet watched my nephew take a bat to my windshield. The morning after Kelsey laughed and hung up on me, I called the bank.
I withdrew my name from the co-signer application. Then I called three relatives who had been quietly planning to help Kelsey with the down payment and told them what had happened to my car and what Kelsey had said about it. I didn’t editorialize.
I just told them what happened, and I let them make their own decisions. Within a week, the house was off the market. Kelsey no longer qualified, and the relatives pulled their contributions.
Kelsey came to my apartment the following Saturday. She wasn’t breezy that time. She stood in my doorway with red, puffy eyes and told me I had ruined her life over a car.
I stepped back and held the door open. “Come in.”
She came in. Jeremy was with her, standing slightly behind her, quieter than I’d ever seen him.
I set my phone on the kitchen counter with the photos pulled up and slid it toward Kelsey. “I worked very hard for this car. You taught your son that destroying someone’s property is something to laugh about.
Now he gets to see what happens when adults refuse to take responsibility.”
Jeremy looked at the photos. The spider-webbed windshield. The dented hood.
The estimated figures. Then he looked up at his mother. “Are we actually supposed to pay for all of that?
Mom, you said it was just for fun… that Aunt Kristen didn’t deserve the car.”
It was the first time that I’d seen his mother not have an answer for him. “You have one option here, Kelsey,” I said. “Fix my car or deal with the consequences.”
It took about three weeks.
Kelsey owned a small camping trailer with a blue stripe along the side that she and Jeremy had taken to the lake every summer since he was four. She listed it for sale. The new owner came on Saturday of that week.
Jeremy stood in the driveway and watched it get hitched to a stranger’s truck. Kelsey used the money, along with some savings, to cover the repairs. My CR-V came back from the shop 10 days later looking exactly as it had the afternoon I drove it off the lot.
About two weeks after the car came back, I picked Jeremy up from school. Kelsey said she was under the weather and asked if I could pick Jeremy up from school. I said yes because Jeremy was not the one I was upset with.
He climbed into the passenger seat, dropped his backpack on the floor, and looked around for a moment. Then he ran one finger slowly along the lower edge of the windshield, right where the crack had started. “You can’t even tell,” he said.
“I didn’t know cars cost that much,” he finally added. I kept my eyes on the road. “That’s why people take care of things that belong to others, dear.”
Jeremy nodded slowly.
Then, somewhere on the highway between his school and home, he said, “I’m sorry, Aunt Kristen. About the car.”
He said it to the window in the slightly strangled way of a 10-year-old producing his first real apology and not entirely sure how it’s supposed to come out. “Thank you, Jeremy,” I replied.
“That means a lot.”
When I pulled up to Kelsey’s house, she was waiting on the porch. She watched her son go inside, then looked at me through the windshield. I drove away thinking the lesson had finally landed in exactly the right place.
Jeremy learned that actions have a cost.
