The Evenings
We worked on that truck every night for three weeks. I would get home from the shop around five, eat whatever Sabrina had on the stove, and by six Micah and I were in the barn.
The first week was all finding out. We pulled the plugs and squirted Marvel Mystery Oil in the cylinders and let it sit.
We turned the engine over by hand with a breaker bar on the crank bolt. It moved. Micah cheered like we’d won something.
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We pulled the gas tank, which on those trucks sits behind the seat in the cab. It was half full of something that looked like apple butter and smelled worse.
We flushed it twice with a garden hose and let it dry in the sun for two days.
I showed Micah how to rebuild the carburetor on the workbench. It is a simple one-barrel, about as plain as carburetors come, and I made him lay every part out on a clean shop rag in the order it came off.
“Why does it matter what order?” he asked.
“Because in half an hour you’re going to have to put it back together,” I said. “And you’re not going to remember. Nobody remembers.”
He laid them out in rows like he was setting a table. He went slow. He kept his tongue between his teeth the whole time, the same way his mother does when she’s threading a needle.
And every evening, somewhere between seven and eight o’clock, a car slowed on the road outside the barn door. Never stopped. Just slowed, and then went on.
Micah stopped asking whose car it was. He knew. We both knew. After a while I think he started to look forward to it a little, the way you look forward to a train going by at the same time every night.