The Clutch She Finished on the Gravel

On the flatbed was an engine hoist, a big one, and two long steel posts laid side by side, and a pile of arms and cables chained down under a tarp.

“Morning, Rhea,” Ennis said.

“Ennis, what is this?”

“It’s a lift,” he said. “Two-post, ten thousand pounds. My son-in-law bought it at an auction three years ago to put in his machine shed, and he never did pour the floor for it. It’s been sitting behind his barn under that tarp.”

His son-in-law, a big quiet man in a feed store cap, nodded at me. “It’s not new,” he said. “But it works. I tested the power unit last night.”

“I can’t buy a lift right now,” I said. “I don’t have it.”

“Nobody asked you to buy it,” Ennis said. “You use it till you can get your own, or till you don’t need one. Then you can give it back if you want. I’m not in any hurry.”

“And the engine hoist is mine,” one of the other men said. “I’ve got two. I don’t need two.”

I stood there on the gravel with my keys in my hand.

“Saw you out here Tuesday,” Ennis said, looking at the highway and not at me. “I’ve seen men quit for less. Figured you’d done enough of that by yourself.”

That was all he ever said about it, then or later.

The bay one floor was clean by then. I had swept up the oil dry Wednesday and scrubbed it twice with degreaser.

The four men carried the lift posts off the flatbed and laid them on the concrete to measure where they would go.

That was when I went to pull up the old floor plate.

It was still lying across the middle of the bay, rusted down in the two spots where Dean had put screws through it to hold it flat.

I got a pry bar under one end and leaned on it, and the screws came up out of the concrete with a dry crack.

I lifted the plate up and set it to the side.

Underneath, in the concrete, where nobody had seen it for fifteen years, were letters.

They had been drawn with a nail in the wet slab when Dean and I poured the new pad for that lift in the spring of 2011. I had forgotten all about it.

R + D 2011.

Dean had done it while I was washing the wheelbarrow out. He had called me over to look, grinning, and I had told him he was silly, and then I had kissed him on the cheek right there in the shop.

I knelt down on the floor and put my fingers in the letters. They were still sharp. The concrete had kept them exactly the way he made them.

Behind me, the men stopped talking. I heard somebody set down a wrench very quietly.

I did not cry. I thought I might. Instead I just knelt there for a while with my hand on the R, and then on the D, and I said in my head, “I’m still here, Dean. The doors are still open.”

When I stood up, Ennis cleared his throat. “We can set it over to the side,” he said. “If you want to leave that showing.”

I looked at the letters. I looked at the posts lying on the floor.

“No,” I said. “Set it right where the old one was.”

We were marking the holes when Curtis pulled in.