The Repair Bill They Would Not Pay

My ex and the rich man she left me for refused to pay their bill so I let the whole town see them for what they were

Preston Vance stood in the open bay of my garage with his hands in the pockets of a coat that cost more than my truck, looked at the invoice I had printed for him, and let it drop to the concrete without reading past the first line.

“I’m not paying that,” he said. “You should be thanking me.”

Behind him my ex-wife, Renee, smiled the way she used to smile at me across our old kitchen table when she had already decided something and was just waiting for me to catch up. She did not look at the paper on the floor. She looked at me.

“Wade,” she said, soft, almost kind, “don’t make this ugly. You still want your weekends with the kids, don’t you.”

I want to tell you I had a good answer ready. I didn’t. I stood there in the only thing I own outright in this world, a one-bay cinderblock garage on Route 7 just past the edge of Ewell, and I felt forty-six years old and about twelve inches tall. A space heater ticked in the corner. A coffee can of bolts sat on the bench. And in my bay sat a gleaming cherry-red 1967 Pontiac GTO, a car I had spent a week of my life bringing back from the dead, and the two people in front of me had come to take it without paying a cent, and they had put my children’s names into it on purpose so I would understand the rules.

I need to back up, because this is not a story about a car. It never was.

My name is Wade Dalton. I grew up three miles from where I sit right now, in the foothills of southern Ohio where the land stops being flat and starts folding up on itself, where Route 7 runs along the creek bottom past the feed store and the Methodist church and the Dinner Bell, Darlene Pruitt’s diner, which has had the same coffee and the same pie and more or less the same crowd since before I could see over the counter. My daddy fixed cars, and his daddy fixed cars and farm machinery. I have been under a hood since I was nine years old. It is the one thing I have never once doubted about myself.

I married Renee Calhoun when we were both twenty-four. We had two kids, Maddie and Tyler. For a long time I thought we were happy. I know now that I thought that because I was happy, and I never looked close enough to see that she wasn’t. Renee wanted things. Not bad things. She wanted a kitchen that didn’t have my work boots by the door tracking creek mud across the floor. She wanted to go somewhere on a Friday that wasn’t the high school football field. She wanted a man whose hands came clean.

Preston Vance has hands that come clean. He owns Vance Motors, the big glass dealership out on the four-lane in Ryerton, the county seat, forty minutes from here. He is the kind of man who gets his picture in the Ryerton Courier shaking hands with ballplayers and cutting ribbons, who sits on three boards and heads the regional dealers’ association and donates a scoreboard so his name goes on it. He is fifty-two and handsome in a way that photographs well. He found my wife at a fundraiser for the hospital auxiliary, back when we were still married, and he worked at her for most of a year before she told me.