The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

I thought he meant that he knew I blamed him for it, which I had not meant, and I thought that was a conversation we could have later when his arm was out of the strap.

I went to bed. In the morning his truck was gone and the coffee cup he had used was rinsed and upside down on the rack.

He didn’t answer the phone. Not that week, not that month. I called on Sundays. Then I called on Sundays and Wednesdays. Then I stopped counting.

His voicemail greeting stayed the same for five years, his voice a little younger than the one I remembered: “You’ve got Dace, leave it, I’ll call back.” He did not call back. I left messages I would not play for you now.

Some were just “Hey, the Duster’s fine, I’m fixing the Duster.” Some were breathing and a man saying, “Well.”

The Duster came to the shop on the back of a rollback the day after the wreck, and I told the driver to put it in the far bay. Roric stood in the shop door and looked at it.

“Scrap?” he said. It was a reasonable question. A 1970 Duster with the frame pushed, the passenger-side floor torn, the quarter folded, and the door beyond saving is, to most shops in the county, a parts car.

“No,” I said.

“You want me to start a list?”

“Start a list.”

That is how it began. I need you to understand that I told myself it was for Dace.

I told myself that when he came home, or called, or even sent a text, I would have something to put in front of him, a finished car with the 340 sounding right and the green paint gleaming in the lot, and I would not need the speech.

The car would be the speech. In my family, a man shows he loves you by fixing something of yours. My father welded combine parts in a barn outside Golden City for forty years and never once said the word love to me or to my mother.

When I was nine and broke my arm falling off a hay wagon, he sat in the emergency room waiting area for four hours and then rebuilt the wagon’s tailgate that weekend so it would not happen again. That was the entire conversation.

I took it as a language, and I thought it was a whole one.

Sassy Grass Green is the color of the Duster, a real Mopar paint code from 1970, a green so loud it looks like a lime that has been to church.

We found the car in a hay barn near Lockwood for nine hundred dollars when Dace was sixteen.

I remember the two of us lying on our backs on the barn floor looking at the rust in the floor pans and Dace saying, “Dad, there’s more hole than floor.” And me saying, “That’s called an opportunity.”

We spent two summers on it. I let him do the wiring. I let him get his own knuckles bloody.

When he turned eighteen, we stood in the lot at the shop and the 340 caught on the third crank, and he grinned at me with grease on his teeth like I’d handed him a country.

Now the car was in pieces in the far bay under a tarp, and I was alone with it.