The Night I Towed His Cadillac Home

The shop

We pulled in at ten to one. I backed the DeVille through the big door and set it down on the concrete under the lights, and I fired up the hanging gas heater over the bench. The shop smelled like it always does, like diesel and hydraulic oil and the coffee that has been on the burner since Monday.

I dragged the tall stool from behind the parts counter, the one with the cracked red seat that my dad sat on for thirty years, and set it near the heater for him. Harlan looked at it, then at me, and sat down without a word. He kept my coat on.

Julie came down from the house in her nightgown, my old barn coat, and her snow boots. She had a thermos of fresh coffee and half a pan of lemon bars. She took one look at her father, sitting on that stool in my chore coat with his fedora in his lap, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“Daddy,” she said. “Come up to the house. Please. It’s warm, and the bed’s made.”

“I’m fine, Julie. I’m staying with the car.”

She looked at me. I gave her a small nod. She poured him a cup and put it in both his hands and kissed the top of his head, and she whispered something to him I did not hear. Then she squeezed my arm on the way out and went back up the path to the house. She had to be at the school kitchen by six.

That left the two of us, under the lights, with fourteen below on the other side of the door.