The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

The first year, I did the structure. The Duster is a unibody, which means there is no separate frame to bolt a new one under, and when one corner gets shoved the whole car remembers it.

I pulled it on the frame machine a little at a time, sometimes twenty minutes of pull and a full day of looking. I cut out the floor on the passenger side and welded in new pans. I took the quarter panel off in sections.

Roric tracked down a good one on a car in a salvage yard in Carthage that had been sitting in the weeds since the Reagan years, and he drove up and paid cash and came back with it on a trailer, grinning like he’d found a treasure map.

Roric has run the parts counter at my shop since my father-in-law handed it to me in 1996. He is seventy-one.

He has a Thermos of coffee so old the paint has worn off the shoulders, a landline with a cord long enough to reach the back lot, and a way of answering the phone, “Pittaway,” with one syllable that makes it sound like a verdict.

He does not talk much. In thirty years I had heard him say perhaps four things that were not about parts.

That is why I did not notice, for five years, that he was doing something quiet and enormous right under my nose.

Dace got married in the spring of the third year. A church in Wichita, a reception in a fire hall. I knew about it because Yolanda told me, in the kitchen, standing very straight, three weeks before. “I’m going,” she said.

“I’m not asking you.” The bride was named Brynn, a red-haired dental hygienist, and Yolanda gave me those facts the way a woman drops bread for birds, one at a time, while my back was turned.

“Did he invite me?”

“He didn’t un-invite you,” she said. “He didn’t think you’d come. That’s not the same.”

I said I had a Duster in the booth that week. That is a true sentence. It is also the most cowardly one I have ever spoken.

She went alone in her good blue dress with a casserole dish for the shower, because she is a Missouri woman and she does not enter a family’s life without a covered dish. She was gone three days.

I slept in the recliner with the television on and did not know what to do with my hands.

A girl came in the fourth year. Junie. Yolanda told me over a Tuesday supper, setting down the fork. “She has your chin,” she said, and then she went and washed a clean dish for a long time with her back to me.

The second and third years were the hard work. The engine I rebuilt in the shop’s back room with a machinist in Neosho who bored the block and let me stay and watch. I rebuilt the carburetor twice.

I stripped the old paint and found, under the factory green, a crooked letter D scratched into the cowl near the windshield with a screwdriver, the work of a seventeen year old boy, and I did not touch it.

I painted the car at night. A man who does collision work all day does not have patience in him for a customer’s job after supper, but I could do my own, with the booth fans loud and the radio off, in my father’s coveralls.