The Taillights We Fixed for Free
Saturday Morning
It was the prettiest October day you could ask for. Fifty-four degrees at nine o’clock, sun out, the maples around the church gone red and gold, the leaves blowing across the parking lot in little skittering circles.
I wore my red flannel shirt, the one Tyler says makes me look like a lumberjack, and I brought two lawn chairs, a card table, a thermos of coffee, the scotcheroos, and the box from the parts store. Tyler brought his toolbox, a creeper, a headlamp for later, and the knee pads he used for walking beans.
We set up at the end of the lot nearest Main Street. Hailey came at nine with her mother’s clipboard, and she wrote the date across the top of a sheet of notebook paper and drew a line for every car.
“How many do you think?” she asked.
“If we get ten I’ll be happy,” I said.
The first car pulled in at 9:06. It was Dale from the parts store in his Silverado, with his brake light out since Labor Day, grinning like a kid.
Tyler had it fixed in four minutes.
“One,” Hailey said, and wrote it down.
The Line
I will not tell you about every car. I could. Hailey kept the sheet, and I have it in my Bible now, folded in thirds.
By ten o’clock there were six cars waiting along the curb. By eleven there were fourteen. People pulled in, and Tyler and I walked around behind each one. I would say “brakes,” and they would step on the brake, and I would say “left,” and they would hit the turn signal, and I would say “now the other one.”
Most of it was bulbs. A 3157 bulb costs about four dollars and comes out with a quarter turn of the socket, and nine people out of ten have no idea theirs is out until somebody tells them.
Some of it was cracked lenses, and for those Tyler cleaned the plastic with a rag and some rubbing alcohol and laid the red repair tape over the crack, smooth and tight, so it would show red and not white. And every time he did it, he said the same thing.
“That’s a patch, not a fix. You’ll want a new lens. The salvage yard in St. Cloud has most of them for forty or fifty bucks.”
He said it to a farmer twice his size. He said it to a young mother with three car seats in the back. He said it to the Methodist minister.
People brought things. That is what happens in a town like ours. Somebody brought a crockpot of sloppy joes. The Legion auxiliary brought coffee and a stack of foam cups. A man I did not know left a twenty-dollar bill under my thermos, and when I tried to give it back he was already gone.