The Mechanic Who Knew Their Secret
The garage on the east end of Main
We rebuilt Kessler Motors.
It took the better part of a year. Cole did most of the work himself, evenings and Saturdays, because he was not about to pay another man to do what his own hands could do in his own father’s shop. We hung the old sign back up, the hand-painted one, which Dot had kept wrapped in a blanket in the back of her closet the whole time like a body she could not bury. We put a new Coke machine in, but Cole rigged it, on purpose, to take dimes, because his father’s had, and because he is that kind of sentimental in a way he would never admit to another man.
Dot came to the reopening in a dress she bought new, the first new dress I ever saw her in, and she stood in front of the shop with her arms crossed exactly the way Hank stands in that old photograph, and she could not talk for a while. When she could, all she said was, “He always knew he did not sign it.” And then she put the butterscotch jar back on the counter, the same jar, and filled it, and the first kid who came in for a candy was a farmer’s little girl who did not know she was standing inside fourteen years of somebody’s patience.
Cole and I live in the little house behind the shop now. Not the apartment behind the laundromat, though I would have lived there gladly, and Brenda can choke on that. We live simply. Cole fixes trucks. I keep the books, which is a joke the two of us find funnier than anyone else, the bookkeeper’s daughter keeping honest books in the shop her father helped steal. He still drives a truck that backfires at the stop sign by the school, though he could buy a new one now, because he says the crossing guard would miss him.
Sometimes I think about that couple at the next table in the Bluebird, the ones who traded the little pitying smile. Poor things, in the twelve-dollar dress and the too-long sleeves. I hope wherever they are, they are half as rich as I turned out to be.
What I would say to the woman I was
If I could go back and stand in Garrett Voss’s big house on the hill, at that window where he told me the prize was to get up high enough to look down on where I came from, I would tell that scared twenty-six-year-old girl one thing.
Take the burger.
Take the twelve-dollar dress and the dead man’s jacket and the forty-dollar bottle of wine that took three weeks to save for. Take the man who does the dishes you left in the sink and never mentions it. Take the one who is patient, because patience is just love that refuses to quit, and you are going to find out someday exactly what a patient man is capable of when he has finally been given a reason to be happy instead of a reason to wait.
My father chose the view from the hill. He got to look down on the whole town, and in the end the whole town got to look through him.
I chose a booth at the Bluebird and a mechanic with grease under his nails, and I got the truth, and the truth is worth more than any ring that ever threw light around a room.
I said no to the richest man in the county.
It is the best thing I have ever done.