The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

I laid it on slowly and I stood back and the Duster shone under the booth lights the green of a spring pasture, and I stood there with a spray gun in my hand and talked to it, out loud, because there was nobody else.

“You’d have liked this, son,” I said. “You would have been all over this.”

And one other thing. In the middle of March, every year, Roric took the phone out to the back lot, beside the stack of pallets, and stood with his back to the shop, talking low. It was always the same week. It was always at noon.

I thought he was talking to a cousin in Salina. That is what he said once when I raised an eyebrow, and I had no reason to doubt him. I believed him the way you believe a man who has never lied to you.

I did not think about it again. That is the shameful part. A man had been doing a decent thing in my own parking lot, and I was too wrapped up in my own grief to wonder what it was.

By the fifth fall, the Duster was finished.

I should say that the way a man in my trade means it. The body was straight and the paint was glass. The interior was stitched in the correct black vinyl.

The wheels were on, the chrome was bright, the 340 sat in the engine bay under a fresh coat of Chrysler blue like it had never left the factory.

There was only one thing left, and it took five minutes: put in fuel, connect the battery, and turn the key.

I did not turn the key.

I told myself the carburetor needed a third look. Then the timing needed to be set, and I set it. Then the valve lash. I pulled the distributor and put it back.

I changed the oil twice, and it had never run. A man can find three weeks of work in a thing that needs five minutes. Roric watched this from behind his counter and did not say a word.

The truest reason is this. As long as the engine was cold, there was a reason for the phone to ring. If I fired it, and called, and he did not pick up, then I would know that five years of metal had not said it for me.

I was afraid of my own proof.

That is where I was on a Tuesday evening at the end of October, deer season about to open, the shop quiet, the insurance adjuster’s last Jeep gone, when Roric closed his register drawer and came around the end of the counter, which in thirty years he had done perhaps twice.

He had his Thermos in his hand. He put it down on the fender of a customer’s Silverado. I was bent over the Duster’s engine with a timing light and I did not look up.

“You gonna fire that engine,” he said, “or are you gonna rebuild it until we’re both dead?”

“When it’s ready.”

“It’s been ready since August.”

I put down the timing light. “When he calls.”

“Verlon,” Roric said. “He’s not gonna call.”

I turned around. He was standing very still with his big knotted hands at his sides, the way he stood at a funeral.