The Night I Towed His Cadillac Home

He set the cup down on the bench. “I wanted Julie to marry a man with a desk. Jim Carlson’s boy, from the bank in St. James. Somebody in a white shirt. And she brought home a man with grease on his hands, and all I could see was my father with his hat in his fist.”

“So you wouldn’t shake my hand,” I said. I did not say it hard. I only said it.

“So I wouldn’t shake your hand.” He let out a long breath.

“And by the time Tyler was baptized, I knew I was wrong. I watched you carry that boy up to the font, and I watched the way you looked at my daughter, and I knew it.

“I just could not find the way back from what I’d said in that basement. A man says a thing in front of the whole town and then he has to keep saying it, or admit what he is.”

“What are you, Harlan?”

He was quiet so long I thought he would not answer. Then he said, “A proud old fool who got thirty-one years of being wrong and called it principle.”

I want to tell you I said something wise. I did not. I picked the alternator back up and started putting the case together, because my hands needed something to do.

“Margaret told me,” he said behind me. “Every year on your anniversary. June twelfth. She’d say, ‘Harlan, call that boy by his name.’ Every year.” His voice went thin. “And last June there wasn’t anybody to say it. I sit in that house and I talk to her chair. Nobody answers. That’s what Margaret dying is. It’s nobody telling me when I’m wrong.”

I set down the screwdriver and turned around. He was sitting on the stool again with my coat pulled tight around him, and he looked eighty-four years old for the first time since I had known him.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve got Julie. And you’ve got me, if you want me. I’ll tell you when you’re wrong. I’ve had a lot of practice thinking it.”

He laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, like a cough. It was the first time I had ever heard Harlan Wiese laugh at anything I said.