The Repair Bill They Would Not Pay

She left in the spring two years ago. She took the kids to a house in Ryerton with a circle drive and a pool nobody uses in October, took most of what we had saved, and left me the garage and the little house behind it and a used-up feeling I carried for the better part of a year.

Here is the part that matters. We never went to a judge about the kids. We worked it out between us, handshake and goodwill, me every other weekend and a Wednesday supper and half the summer. I thought that was grown-up of us. I was proud we had kept the lawyers out of our children’s lives.

I understand now that Renee did not see it as grown-up. She saw it as leverage. There was no order, no paper, nothing a court had blessed, just her goodwill, and she had learned she could turn the tap on and off, and that I would do almost anything to keep that water running. The first time she said “we’ll see about your weekend,” over a child-support transfer that was late because my own customer had paid me late, I felt the floor tilt. I paid it off a credit card the next morning. She never had to say it twice after that. She just had to let me remember she could.

So that is the ground I was standing on when Renee called me in September and told me Preston needed a favor. She called it a favor, in a bright, warm voice I had not heard from her in years, and I was fool enough that the warmth did something to me before the words caught up.

Preston had bought a car, she said. A 1967 GTO, a real one, numbers-matching, which if you don’t know cars just means it is worth a great deal of money to the right people. He had bought it out of an estate down in Kentucky, sight mostly unseen, and when it came off the trailer it looked worse than the photographs. The paint and the chrome were good. Underneath, somebody had let it sit in a barn for fifteen years and the engine was a disaster, varnished fuel, a cracked manifold, a carburetor full of what I can only describe as mud, brakes that were more rust than brake.

The Ryerton Harvest Festival was three weeks out. Preston was going to be the grand marshal of the Harvest Festival parade. More than that, Renee told me, and here her voice got a little proud, Preston was up for the Ross Valley Chamber’s Business Leader of the Year, and they announce it at the festival, on the stage in the square, in front of everybody who is anybody in three counties. He wanted to drive that GTO down Main Street in Ryerton with the sun on the hood and half the valley watching. He wanted to roll up to that stage in it.

His own dealership could not do the work. His service department does oil changes and warranty jobs on new trucks, not a fifty-nine-year-old engine, and the one old-timer in Ryerton who used to is dead. Everybody who knows old iron in this part of the state knows the name Dalton. It is not bragging to say that for this job, I was the only man who could do it.

Renee knew that. She knew what it would mean to Preston to have it, and she knew exactly how little I could afford to say no.