The Boy Who Fixed My Truck

That was when I heard the footsteps in the gravel.

He came up over the little rise to the south, walking the shoulder the way a kid walks when he is used to walking a long way, unhurried, saving himself. He was thin in the way that worried me before I even knew a thing about him, and he wore a gray T-shirt gone soft and pale from too many washings, and jeans worn white at the knees, and rubber slides that had flattened out under his feet a long time ago. He carried a plastic grocery sack in one hand, held away from his leg so it would not bang his knee, and when he got close enough I could see that his hands, both of them, were stained so dark with old grease that it looked like it had gone into the skin and stayed.

He stopped a polite distance off, ten or twelve feet, and looked at the raised hood, not at me.

“Ma’am,” he said. “You having truck trouble?”

“I sure am,” I said. “It just up and quit on me. Every light came on and then it went dark.”

He nodded like that meant something to him. “You know anybody around here works on engines?”

“Honey, I was hoping you’d tell me.”

And he said, so simple and matter of fact that I almost laughed, “I fix things.”

Now, I will be honest with you. My first thought was that this was a child, and a small one, maybe ten or eleven, and that the kindest thing I could do was thank him and send him on his way before he got that grease all over Sam’s engine and I had two problems instead of one. But he had already set the grocery sack down in the weeds, careful, like it held eggs, and he had already stepped up to the fender and put his hands on the edge of it and was looking down into the engine bay with an expression I had seen exactly one place before, which was on Sam’s face, on a Saturday, when a job was interesting.

He did not touch anything. That is the thing I noticed first. A grown man would have started grabbing at wires. This boy just looked. He tilted his head and followed something with his eyes, tracing a line only he could see, and after a while he asked me a question that a mechanic would ask.

“When it died,” he said, “did the lights all come on together, or one at a time?”

“Together,” I said. “All at once. Like a Christmas tree.”

“And did it kind of stumble first, then just cut out? Like something turned it off instead of it running out of gas?”