The Old Ford in Mom’s Driveway

Lowell And Beryl

I drove over to the co-op shop after work Thursday, while there was still a couple hours of sun. The co-op does not keep a full shop anymore, but the old building is still back behind the fertilizer plant, and the old mechanics still go there afternoons to tinker and tell lies.

Lowell Fisk was 81. He came to the co-op out of the Army in 1962 and ran the shop until he retired.

Beryl Unger was 76. He worked under Lowell from the seventies on. His hands had started shaking a few years back, and he did not talk about it.

Arvid Quick, 78, had worked the parts counter and the welding bench beside them for thirty years, and he was sitting on the third bucket.

They were both sitting on upturned five-gallon buckets by the big door when I pulled up, out in the last warm sun, wearing their seed caps and flannel shirts like they had worn every day of their working lives.

“Gaylene,” Lowell said. “Junie says your mom’s truck has a knock.”

“Spun a rod bearing,” I said. “Number three, I think, from where it’s loudest.”

“How’d a woman 79 years old spin a rod bearing driving to the elevator?” Beryl said.

I did not answer right away. Lowell looked at me over the top of his glasses, and I knew he already had a pretty good idea.

“Somebody borrowed it,” I said.

They both let that sit. Neither one asked who. Out here, they did not need to.

“I want to rebuild it in her driveway, so she can watch,” I said. “But with no lift and no shop, that’s a four-hand job, and I’d rather have eight.”

Lowell took off his cap and turned it around in his hands and put it back on. That is what he does when he is about to say yes and wants to look like he is thinking about it.

“Saturday?” he said.

“Saturday,” Beryl said, before I could even answer. Arvid just raised his hand.

“I’ve got a hoist,” Lowell said. “Well, the co-op’s got a hoist. It’s been sitting in the back corner since they closed the shop. I’ll ask the manager, but I already know what he’ll say.”

What the manager said, when Lowell asked him Friday morning at the coffee table, was to take it and keep it as long as we needed it. Then he poured Lowell a second cup and asked what time Saturday.