It caught and roared and shook the whole green body of that car, and the sound went up into the rafters and filled the bay and rolled out into the lot and across Route K and over the bean stubble, loud as a promise.
Blue smoke came out of the tailpipes and hung in the cold. Dace’s foot moved on the pedal and it answered. It answered everything.
He was laughing, I saw, through his tears, with his head back against the headrest and his eyes on the roof, the way he had laughed at eighteen with grease on his teeth.
Dace shut it off after a minute and the silence rang. He sat with his hands on the wheel. “Dad,” he said. “There’s somebody in my truck. I told her to give me ten minutes. It’s been twenty.”
I looked toward the lot. In the passenger seat of the gray Ford, a woman with red hair had both hands over her face, and next to her, in a car seat, something small in a pink coat was kicking at the dashboard.
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“Her name’s Junie,” Dace said. “She doesn’t know anybody yet. She doesn’t know you.”
He opened the car door and got out, and put his hand on the back of my neck, the way I used to when he was small, and walked me across the lot.
Brynn got out first. She did not say anything. She took one look at me and hugged me, a hard fast hug, a woman who knew exactly how long she’d waited to do it. Then she opened the back door, unbuckled the little coat, and put my granddaughter into my arms.
Fourteen months. A round warm weight, smelling of crackers. She looked up at me with a frown. She had my chin. Yolanda was right.
“Hi, Junie,” I said. My voice was a wreck. “I’m your grandpa. I fix cars.”
She looked at the green Duster in the bay, and pointed, and said the only word she apparently knew that mattered. “Car.”
Every person in that parking lot laughed, even Roric.
I want to end this honestly, because a story that wraps up too neatly is a story that lies.
We did not get the five years back. I missed my son’s wedding. I missed the first fourteen months of Junie, the first steps and the first teeth and the first Christmas.
Yolanda carried a weight alone that was mine, and I will be paying that back at the kitchen table for a long time.
That afternoon Yolanda put a pot roast on the table in the break room behind the parts counter, the way she does for every Saturday crew. Dace sat in the chair beside mine. Junie sat on his knee and ate crackers off Roric’s Thermos lid, and Roric let her.
“Dad,” Dace said, quietly, passing the salt. “Call me Sunday. Six o’clock. I’ll pick up.”
I said I would. And then, because I had spent five years learning what it costs to leave a thing unsaid, I said the other part too, in front of all of them, plain, with my mouth full of roast.
“You are the only thing,” I said. “You always were.”
Dace looked at his plate. Brynn put her hand on his arm.
Out in the bay, the Duster ticked as it cooled, green and loud in the October light, and for the first time in five years I did not care in the least who was looking at it.