The Night I Towed His Cadillac Home
The receiving line at Trinity Lutheran ran from the sanctuary doors down the basement stairs, and I had shaken maybe sixty hands by the time I got to my new father-in-law. I put mine out. Harlan Wiese looked at it the way you look at a part somebody carries in wrapped in a greasy rag.
“You fix tractors,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Trucks too. Anything with a motor in it.”
He kept his hands folded over the buttons of his gray suit coat. “Then you’ll understand that I’m not in the habit of shaking hands with the help.” He leaned past me, kissed Julie on the cheek, and moved on toward the coffee urn.
That was June of 1993. I was twenty-five years old, with grease in the creases of my knuckles that no amount of Lava soap would ever lift, and a bride in a dress her mother had sewn on the dining room table. Julie squeezed my fingers so hard I felt her new ring cut into them.
Neither of us said a word. It was our wedding day, and you do not make a scene in a church basement in front of the ladies who baked the bars.
For thirty-one years after that, Harlan never once called me Dale. At Thanksgiving it was “Pass the potatoes down to the mechanic.” At Christmas, when the grandkids were tearing into presents, it was “Is the mechanic’s truck blocking the drive again?”
When our son Tyler was born, Harlan stood at the nursery window in Mankato and said to his wife, loud enough for me to hear, “Well, he has Julie’s chin, at least.”
I would like to tell you I never let it get to me. That would be a lie, and I was raised not to tell those.
The call
The phone rang at 11:52 on a Tuesday night in January. I know the time because I looked at the clock radio on Julie’s side of the bed, and the red numbers were the only light in the room. It was fourteen below outside, the kind of cold that makes the house pop in the walls.
“Hoffman Repair,” I said. That is how I answer every call after dark. Nobody rings a shop owner at midnight to ask how his day went.
It was Deb at county dispatch. I had known Deb since she was a teenager babysitting for the Lindgren kids. “Dale, I’ve got a stalled car on County 14, about eleven miles out, a mile past the Petersen place. Elderly driver, by himself. Deputy Olson’s tied up at a rollover clear on the other end of the county. Can you go?”
“I’m going,” I said. I was already sitting up with my bare feet on the cold floor.
Then Deb paused, and Deb never pauses. “Dale, it’s Harlan Wiese.”
My father started Hoffman Repair in 1971 in a pole shed on the east edge of Alder Creek, and he had one rule painted above the office door in red barn paint.