Unexpectedly buying a car

I was intending to buy a car, so it wasn’t completely unexpected.  The unexpected part came when I bought a car about a week before I intended to.

Earlier this month my brothers and I finally sold our father’s ranch/farm, after only ten years (which will get a post of its own), and L and I decided that part of the money was going to have to go to replace the ’95 Mercury Tracer wagon we’ve been driving since 1997.  It has 180,000 miles on it, and bits kept crumbling and falling off.  The engine, which we put in only three years ago, had already developed a lower end rattle.  It needed new shocks, new struts, tie rods, a hood, a front bumper, front grillework, and I’m sure that’s not all.  That’s just all I can remember right now.  So even before the settlement check came from the abstract company, L, T, and I were talking about what kind of replacement car we wanted.

T and I were both strongly in favor of a sedan instead of another estate wagon.  Since we have Piet for hauling things, we don’t need the cargo capacity of a wagon.  I refuse to buy anything that has a GM marque on it, and won’t even think of anything with an automatic transmission.  (I hate, with a passion, any car that tries to think for me, and particularly any car that tries to shift for me.  They never get it right.)  I also wanted to avoid Hondas if possible, first because you might as well stick a “Steal Me” sign on them, particuarly the Civics, and second because they’re so . . . well, they’re so common!  L doesn’t want anything really big, that she can’t see the corners of when she tries to park.

Things began going bad last Sunday, when L came in after driving T back from Navasota and mentioned that the Merc’s battery light had started coming on when the car was idling at traffic lights.  I figured this meant either the alternator or the battery was dying, most likely the alternator, and we didn’t have much time left.  Monday I went by the new CarMax store in Pflugerville to see what they had.

It got worse when the salesman asked what I was looking for in a new car.  I said it was easier to tell him what the deal-breakers would be:  no GM marques, no SUVs of any description, don’t really want another wagon.  He held up under all that, but when I said “if it doesn’t have a manual transmission, don’t show it to me,” he got a strange look on his face, and I knew he’d moved me in his mental card-file from “prospective buyer” to “bleedin’ waste of my bloody time.”  Nonetheless, he went over and looked up what they had for me (not very much), and sent me off with a brochure and a suggestion to get on their Web site to see what I might find at other CarMax locations that they might transfer to Austin.  Although he couldn’t have known it, that was about the best suggestion he could have made.

The Merc continued to sicken.  Tuesday night, when I picked up T late from school, where she’d been putting the newspaper to bed, I saw the few functional dash lights I have left were dimming, the windshield wipers were running sluggish and heavy, and even the headlights were wavering.  I had to race the engine more and more at stoplights to make the battery warning light go out.  After L got home from square dancing, she and I got on CarMax’s Web site and got lucky.  We found three or four cars in Houston and two in San Antonio that met our minimum needs, and a couple of them were almost ideal.  I printed off the best one in Houston and the best in San Antonio to take back out to the showroom with me.  L kept going on about getting one of several Beetles that matched our search, but I just nodded and kept my own counsel about that.  I am so not a Beetle driver . . . .  T later told me that when L started in about buying a Beetle, she just started nodding and saying “Right, Mama.”  She knows that I’m so not a Beetle driver, either.

I was none too soon.  L called me at work Wednesday morning to tell me the Merc had died for good in T’s school parking lot, she’d called AAA to haul it home, and I’d better haul myself on over to CarMax at lunch.  Which I did.

The salesman I’d talked to on Monday wasn’t in, so the receptionist called up his partner, and I sat down with him to see whether the Houston car was still available, since we’d decided it was the best deal by far.  Fortunately it was, so he sent off an inquiry to Houston for them to do a walkaround and confirm it was what they said it was.  A couple of hours later Houston called back and said that yes, everything was exactly as shown in the listing, and did I want them to truck it up to Austin so I could see and test-drive it?  I told them go ahead, and wrote a check for $150 to cover the transfer fee (a kind of earnest money, to run off frivolous looky-lous asking for cars to be hauled all over the country, just on spec).  If I buy the car, the $150 gets credited against the purchase price.

Just before noon today I got a call from the salesman:  “my” car had just come in on the truck from Houston, and did I want to come by for a test-drive this afternoon.  L and I decided that after I get off work at 7:30, I’ll hurry back to town, get her, and we’ll go up to see about it before CarMax closes at nine.  If we buy it, then we can start deciding which charitable organization we’re gonna donate the Merc to, for whatever it’ll bring at auction.  Not much, probably, although it might be worth something for the parts.  As an intact auto, its Kelly Blue Book value is nil.