The Nine Wrecks on a Rented Rack

The first thing I noticed was the light. On a normal afternoon the frame machine threw a long shadow across the second bay, and that Friday the sun came through the roll-up door and hit bare concrete.

I stood there with my purse still on my shoulder and Lu’s discharge papers from the surgeon’s office folded in my hand.

I had left him in the truck because his back could not take the gravel.

Four bolt holes sat in the floor where the anchors had been. Around them was a clean gray square, lighter than the rest of the concrete, where eight years of grinding dust had never settled.

There were scrape marks running out the door. Something heavy had been dragged onto a trailer, and somebody had swept up after, which somehow made it worse.

Wes was in the paint booth with the fan running. When he saw my face through the glass he shut it off and came out with his mask pushed up on his forehead.

“I thought you knew,” he said. “Orval said you and Lu had talked it over. He had a man here at nine with a flatbed. I asked him twice, Mallory. He said it was family business.”

Wes is 29. He has worked for us four years, and he is the kind of young man who will not argue with somebody’s daddy.

I did not blame him then, and I do not blame him now.

I walked out to the truck. Lu had the window down and was watching me come across the lot, and I watched him read my face the way he reads a bent door, all at once.

“What,” he said.

“Your dad sold the frame machine,” I said. “It’s gone, Lu. It was gone by ten this morning.”

The machine

I want to tell you what that machine was, because people who have never worked in a body shop think it is just a tool.

It was not just a tool. It was the reason we had a business at all.

Lu and I opened Teague Collision in a block building on the edge of Chillicothe in the spring of 2011.

Lu had been a body man at a dealership for twelve years, and I had been doing books for a feed mill.

His father, Orval, put up half the money for the building. He owned a little excavating business back then and had done well, and he and Lu went in together on the deed.

We were grateful. I want that on the record. We were grateful for a long time.

For the first seven years we sent our frame work out. Any car with a bent unibody or a kinked rail went on a rollback to a bigger shop in Columbus, and they took a good piece of the insurance money for it.

In 2018 Lu found a used bench system, a good one, from a shop that was closing in West Virginia.

It came with the clamps, the tower, the chains and a measuring system. The price was $61,000, financed through the equipment company.

The payment was $640 a month. Lu made every one of them out of the shop account, and when the shop account was thin, he made it out of ours.

I know because I wrote the checks. I have done the books at that shop since the day we opened.

The last payment went out in April. Lu brought home a coffee cake from the grocery that night, which is about as big a celebration as my husband knows how to throw, and we ate it standing up in the kitchen.

He was proud of that machine. He kept the chains oiled and the clamps hung on a pegboard by size.

Our grandson called it Grandpa’s dinosaur because of the tall tower, and Lu let him sit on the bench when it was empty.

Six weeks before that Friday, Lu had surgery on two discs in his lower back.

Thirty years of bending over fenders had finally caught up with him, and the surgeon said if he waited any longer he might lose feeling in his left leg.

So for six weeks my husband had been in a brown recliner in our living room, getting up with a walker and then a cane, while I ran the shop with Wes and a lot of prayer.