The Clutch She Finished on the Gravel

The first anchor nut came off with a scream from the impact gun, and Curtis Haverkamp did not even look at me while it happened. He was looking at the lift.

“Easy on those posts,” he told the three men he had brought. “I want them straight when they come down. I can get four thousand for this thing if it’s straight.”

I was standing in the doorway of bay one with a cup of coffee going cold in my hand.

It was eight in the morning on a Monday in early November, and the sun was just coming over the trees across Highway 63.

My name is Rhea Ackerly. I was fifty-two that fall. For sixteen years my husband Dean and I ran a two-bay repair shop on the highway north of Cabool, Missouri, a cinderblock building with two roll-up doors and a gravel apron out front.

Dean did the heavy work, the engines and the rear ends and the transmissions. I did brakes, clutches, alignments when the machine was working, and the books. We were good at different things, and we were good together.

Dean had died six weeks before that Monday. He had a heart attack at the parts counter in Mountain Grove, reaching for a box of spark plugs.

He was fifty-five. The man behind the counter did chest compressions until the ambulance came, and it did not matter.

Now his stepbrother was taking the lift out of our floor.

“Curtis,” I said. “You know Dean paid for that lift.”

He turned around then. He had on a tan jacket with the name of his car lot stitched on the chest, and he looked tired in a way I had not noticed at the funeral.

“I co-signed for it in 2011,” he said. “My name is on that note at the bank. If Dean had missed a payment, they’d have come after me. That makes it mine as much as anybody’s, and Dean’s not here.”

“Dean never missed a payment.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” he said, and turned back to his men.

I want to be fair to Curtis, because my mother raised me to be fair even when it costs something.

His car lot on the south side of town had been dying for two years. Everybody knew it. The rows of cars kept getting shorter.

And there was the old business with Dean’s mother. When Curtis was twelve, his daddy married her.

Curtis always believed she favored Dean, her own boy, in every way that counted, and he carried that like a stone in his boot for forty-five years.

None of that made it right. A man does not strip his brother’s widow six weeks after the funeral. But I knew where it came from, and knowing helped me keep my voice down.

They worked fast. One of the men ran the nuts off the wedge anchors, eight of them, four at the foot of each post.

Dean had drilled those holes deep when he set them, so the anchors could be punched down through the slab if the lift ever moved.

Then another man took a pair of side cutters to the hydraulic hoses. He did not drain the cylinders. He did not drain the reservoir. He just cut.

The fluid came out of that power unit in a rush, close to three gallons of it, and spread across the concrete toward the drain in a pink sheet.

It soaked the bottom of a box of brake rotors I had stacked against the wall.

“Curtis,” I said.