The Repair Bill They Would Not Pay

“He’ll make it worth your while,” she said. “And Wade, the kids would love to see you doing something real like that, their dad fixing up a famous car. Maddie’s been asking about you.”

That last part was the hook, and she set it clean. Maddie had not been asking about me, I found that out later. But with my daughter’s name in my ex-wife’s mouth, I said yes before I had any business saying yes.

I should have put it in writing. I know that now. Earl told me to. Earl Mabry is eighty-one and has sat in the broke-down recliner in the corner of my shop most mornings since my daddy owned the place, and when I told the regulars what I had agreed to, Earl set down his coffee and said, “Wade, you get that man to sign something. Rich men got short memories about money they owe.” Buck Hollis, who ran the Marathon station until it closed, nodded along. “Get a deposit at least,” Buck said.

I did not get a deposit. I did not get a signature. Preston never even came to my shop until the day he came to take the car. The GTO arrived on a flatbed driven by a kid from the dealership who handed me a key and a sheet of paper with Preston’s cell number and drove off. That was the whole transaction. I told myself a man like Preston Vance does not stiff a working man over a few thousand dollars. I told myself a lot of things that week.

And it was a good week, one of the best weeks of work I have had in years.

I pulled that 389 engine down to nothing. I had parts shipped overnight and paid for them on my own card because the job had a deadline, close to eleven hundred dollars before I turned a wrench, a rebuild kit and a correct carburetor and a manifold I sourced from a man in Indiana who I had to beg. I was in the shop past midnight four nights running. Tyler came by on the Wednesday, my supper night, and I let him hand me wrenches and told him the names of everything, intake, lifter, timing chain, and he wrote some of them down in a little notebook he carries, and I will keep that memory no matter how the rest of this went. When I finally turned the key and that engine lit and settled into a lope so smooth it sounded like it was breathing, Earl took his cap off, and that old man does not take his cap off for much.

I detailed it myself, cleaned the engine bay until the chrome air cleaner threw light, wiped down a dash that had not been clean since Lyndon Johnson was president. When I was done it did not look like a car that had sat in a barn. It looked like it had rolled off a showroom floor. I printed up an honest invoice. Parts at my cost, no markup, because I am stupid that way. Labor at a rate that was fair and frankly low for the skill. Forty-one hundred dollars and change for a week that was worth double that anywhere else in the country.

Then Preston and Renee came to pick it up, and Preston let the invoice fall on the floor without reading it, and told me I should thank him for the opportunity.

I asked him, level as I could keep it, if there was a problem with the number.