The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

“I looked at you,” I said, “and you were all blood, and your eyes were open, and I thought I had driven to a dead boy. And you said you were sorry about the car.

And I thought, this child is lying here broken, and he’s apologizing to me for a pile of sheet metal. And what I meant to say was, don’t you ever. You are the thing.

You are the only thing I ever loved, and you were ruined, and I’d have given every car I ever touched to put you back.” I took a breath that did not go all the way in.

“That’s what I meant, and I said it in the wrong order, and I said it to a bleeding boy, and I never took it back. I should have taken it back in the ambulance.

I should have taken it back at the hospital. I should have taken it back on the phone, or at your door, or any one of the eighteen hundred days. I let you carry it.

I am more sorry than I know how to say in a shop.”

He didn’t say anything. He just stood there and his face broke, the way a good paint job cracks when the metal underneath finally gives, all at once and from the inside.

I put my arms around him. He was taller than me by an inch.

He put his face in my shoulder, and I felt the whole of his weight come down, a man who had been standing straight for five years, and I held my son in the bay under that old painted sign, and I said the thing.

I said it plain. I said it out loud, the word I had not been taught. I said it three times in a row because the first two did not feel like enough.

He said it back, stiffly, into my coat, like a man reading from a language he had only seen written down.

Over his shoulder, Yolanda was crying without a sound, a dish towel wrung tight in both fists, and Roric had his eyes closed and his Thermos clutched against his chest like a rosary.

When Dace stepped back, he looked at the Duster again. “Is it going to run?”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was the first honest thing I’d said about it in three weeks. “I’ve never turned the key.”

He looked at me. “Five years, and you never fired it?”

“I was waiting for you.”

He gave a sound that was half laugh and half something else.

He walked around the car and opened the driver’s door, which swung on hinges I had rebuilt myself, and he lowered himself into the seat and put both hands on the wheel.

He looked out through the windshield at the open bay door and the cold bright morning, and he stayed that way a moment.

“It’s yours,” I said. “It always was. I only kept it for you.”

He reached for the key.

The starter ground once. Twice.

I stood at the fender with my hand flat on the hood, and Roric stood up from his bucket, and Yolanda had gone as still as a woman in church, and on the third crank the 340 caught.