Tomball Thompson ran a successful real estate and insurance business here in Fort Stockton.  Taking almost as much time as running the business was tending to the needs of his mother, Nadine.  When his dad died years earlier overseeing her affairs had fallen on his shoulders, his only sister having moved to an artist’s colony outside Austin needing to tap into her creative side.

Nadine was in good health.  Still lived in the faux-Spanish Colonial house Tomball grew up in.  She was active at Second Baptist Church and tight with Brother Bob based on her annual tithe.  Yet, not a day would go by that Tomball didn’t get a phone call with some new need he’d have to address, or a complaint about one he already had.

Every two years Tomball would buy Nadine a new car, the one being traded in having less than 3,000 miles on the odometer.  “If it wasn’t two years old I could sell it as a demonstrator,” Cal claimed.  Cal had been Tomball’s salesman at Cactus CHEV-Olds going on twenty some-odd years.

As time for trading in Nadine’s 1965 Ninety-Eight approached, Tomball was determined to take a different tact.  In order to stretch her investment funds and make his mother less of a menace in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, he special ordered a new Chevrolet Caprice hardtop sedan.  Checked every option box.  Butternut Yellow with a black vinyl top.  He thought the color would be cheery, but that was probably just wishful thinking.

“Can you come by and pick up your mother’s car tomorrow?” Cal asked six weeks later, reaching Tomball by phone at his office.  “Just rolled off the truck and I can get it washed and full of gas by noon.”

“You know Thursdays are when I get my hair done at the Klip-N-Dye.  Then lunch at the club.  We’ve gone over this a hundred times.  I swear you never listen.  It’ll just have to wait till Friday,” Nadine explained.  Tomball hung up shaking his head and called Cal back to modify the arrangements.

“We’ll be there,” Tomball reassured him, then called Nadine to make arrangements.

Friday when Tomball picked her up, Nadine was dressed to the nines, smelling of Arpege perfume, Aqua-Net hairspray and Listerene with subtle hints of Bloody Mary, ready to discuss the inadequacies of the new lawn service he’d hired two weeks earlier.  The trip to Cactus CHEV-Olds was mercifully short.  The Butternut Yellow Caprice, gleaming in the West Texas sun, was waiting at the front entrance, Cal standing beside it with a smile looking as if it had been tattooed to his face.

Nadine walked right past Cal and the Caprice, headed for the showroom.  “Wait, mother!” Tomball shouted.  “This is your new car!”  Startled, Nadine turned around, still ignoring Cal, and glanced in the general direction of the Caprice.  The look she gave the car was akin to one a crowd of nudists at the beach might give a leper who’d wandered in by mistake.

“Whatever do you mean, Son?”

“We special ordered it.  Every option.  Butternut Yellow,” Tomball explained.

“You don’t really expect me to be seen in a Chev-ro-let, do you?  To actually go to church in such a thing?  God forbid, to drive the girls to lunch at the club in a car made for the masses?”  Nadine was incredulous.

“Why don’t we just get in the car and drive to Odessa where they have a Cadillac dealership.  Pick out a new damned Fleetwood,” Tomball blurted out.  He was exhausted from the whole process.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Tommy,” Nadine huffed.  “That would be gauche.  Only Republicans drive Cadillacs.  If I drove to church in a new Cadillac, Brother Bob would expect me to write a check for the new baptistry instead of having a church wide fund drive.  No.  A Cadillac is out of the question.  And you will do to watch your language, young man.”

Cal was silent.  Tomball, going on 52 years-old, was tongue-tied.  Nadine was now clutching her pocketbook so tightly her knuckles were as white as the kid leather gloves that covered them.  She looked over at the showroom and pointed to a Burgundy Mist over black leather Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Luxury Sedan.  “That one will do just fine.”

Tomball wrote a check for $4,331 for the Oldsmobile, 40% more than the Caprice had been.  To keep the peace with Cal, he bought the Caprice for his wife, 20% down, the rest spread over 36 months.  When he got it home, his wife replied, “I really wanted a Ford Country Squire for the carpool.”

Tough to please everybody.  But a ‘67 Ninety-Eight Luxury Sedan is about as close as you can get.