Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (11 page)

“Did you know,” Mr. Rossi said, “that the king of hearts is alone in not having a mustache?”

Everyone stopped and looked at him for a second, the record player needle caught in the groove and making a low thump-hiss through the speakers. Sarah nodded. “I wasn't really after rhetorical questions, but thanks, Mr. Rossi.”

He nodded and smiled, gave a little wave to the room. “Nothing more than a medieval copying error,” he said. Alison patted his arm.

Mr. Kesler made his way back from the soft drinks, lifted the needle, and put on another side. Benny Goodman's “King Porter Stomp” crackled through the room and the dancers all took to the floor to practice shuffling the deck. Mrs. Skidmore danced with Bill, Mr. Rossi with Lila, who didn't much mind his paroxysms of trivia. The Harmons danced in matching golf clothes, their movements practiced and smooth, Mr. Harmon reaching out his hand without even looking at it, finding his wife's hand, her fingers slotted into his, her weight falling against him. Through long familiarity they'd worn grooves and depressions in one another, the years rubbing smooth the edges of their differences. One of the things Alison used to think about most in the first months after the accident was how Marty would always remain thirty-four years old—a young man in photos, in the videos from Ocean City, in the memory of everyone who'd known him. She would go off and wrinkle and decline without him, would draw down into an old age that he had simply sidestepped. It felt almost like a betrayal of him, or him of her. The idea had made her think of eleventh grade, Mr. Loggin's natural science class, and the film strips they had watched to learn Einstein's general theory of relativity. One of the filmstrips showed a cartoon of twins, young red-haired men with big drawn-on freckles, one of whom boarded a rocket and flew through space at the speed of light, gone for seventy years or so before returning to earth. In the last frame (flipped to after the accompanying record gave its loud
ping
), the door of the rocket was open, with a stepladder leading down, and the earthbound twin, now an old man with a cane and wire glasses, was there to meet his astronaut brother, who had aged only a minute or so, his red hair still thick and wavy. Years later, Alison remembered nothing about Einstein's theories, but still saw in her mind the expressions on both brothers' faces, the exclamation points drawn above their heads, the shock of their recognition, or their lack of it.

Alison sidled over by Mr. Kesler just as he bent down to his record collection, and the pipe stuck in the pocket of his jumpsuit fell out and clattered across the floor. As he retrieved it and straightened up, he looked startled to find her next to him.

“You know,” she said, “you could have briefed him a little bit before you brought him over.”

He looked around the room. “Who…what?”

“Your son, about my husband's accident.”

He flushed and began fingering the bowl of his pipe, as Max had busied himself with the drill yesterday.

“Well, Alison. That's your business to tell him or not tell him. I'm no gossip.”

“I wish you were a gossip. The whole thing was awkward as hell, for me at least.”

Mr. Kesler nodded. “He put his foot in it, did he?” He snorted a little.

“Yeah, and by the way, I thought I was the only one you ever told the car story to.”

He tucked the pipe away in his pocket and wrinkled his brow thoughtfully, looking for all the world like one of her freshman students trying to explain a plagiarized paper. “No, if you think back, the part I told just to you was about Uncle Crawford's bottle of rye.” He winked at her. “Don't want to sully the family name.”

For half a second, given her usual doubt of her own memory, she believed him. But no.

“You're good,” she told him. “I'll give you that.”

“Well, I suppose you read about my exploits in the paper. That story has been making the rounds for fifty-odd years, if you can believe that.” He shook his head sadly, grimacing theatrically. “Thing is, I hate to see so many folks around here disappointed.”

“How so?”

“Well, if—-just if—that car sank so far in the mud it isn't there to be found anymore, it would be a letdown for everyone, once the lake drains.”

She smiled, amazed at how accurately Max had his father figured. “Think of the children, right?”

“Just talking to Rossi earlier,” he continued. “He was telling me about sinkholes in Florida. Half a minute, an entire house gone. God knows how far under that Chrysler is by now. Could be twenty feet under, don't you think?”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” she said. “Just today I saw people hauling a grocery cart out of there. I saw part of a
pool
table, of all things.” So, maybe she wanted to see him squirm a little, too. Whether out of sympathy for Max or for some other reason, she couldn't say.

He shook his head, licked his lips, adjusted his glasses. “Well, sure, a cart, or some recent thing. But we're talking about a
car
. We're talking fifty-plus years. You're a smart girl; I don't have to explain the physics.”

They both became aware of the
thump-hiss
of the needle again, and he crouched to change the record. By now, the dancers had reached that stage Alison liked so much, their clothes lightly damp with sweat, their faces bright pink, mouths open as they guzzled water, their bodies shedding years, reclaiming their heat and blood. Mr. Rossi, in particular, was deep red in the face, his skin glistening with sweat he wiped away with a checked bandanna.

Alison turned back to Mr. Kesler. “You know, it could be nobody even cares about that car anymore.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out the newspaper article. He had laminated it by pressing it between two pieces of clear shelf paper. “Right there,” he said, pointing to his own printed name. “They care. A town like this, about all we have is our old stories, wars and heroes, a fire, a flood, a scandal or two.”

“Well, I guess you're right,” she said. “And you must be the king of old stories.”

“Yesterday afternoon, Vern Macy called me and offered free towing to drag it out of there.” He kept nervously readjusting his glasses, and Alison felt a surge of sympathy for him, a slight anger toward Max for wanting to watch his father's public embarrassment.

“Then damn all that mud, if it took your car,” she said. He nodded, seemed to relax a little. Maybe it was the best thing, to let herself be recruited, as Max called it.

The evening slowly wound down, Sarah and Bill dancing with a straggler or two, going over the new moves, no music behind them. The others drank water. Mr. Kesler put on his cotton gloves to rebox his record collection. Alison walked over to Mr. Rossi, beside the cookie table.

“So, Mr. Rossi, you ever hear about the War of Jenkins's Ear?”

“Why, yes, Alison. As a matter of fact, I have.” His face was impossibly pink, his ears almost glowing.

She smiled. Of course he had.

“At least six people have entered the history books because of ear loss,” he told her. “There was, most famously, van Gogh, of course, but no one remembers—”

Just then, the phone on the table rang loudly, and Alison answered it. The voice on the other end, a man's, was awkward and stumbling, asking for “Mrs. Sarah Michaels” as if reading it off a card. The voice was familiar somehow, like she'd heard it on the radio in the background of some kitchen.

“Sorry,” she said, “Sarah can't come to the phone, and if you're selling something, it is after nine o'clock at—”

“Who I need to speak to,” he said, “is a Mrs. Alison Durst, if she's there. I gotta talk to her.” He said this with a stiffness and bulky formality that made her recognize the voice the way she would recognize a stomach punch: That quiet, stumbling voice belonged to Lem Kerns, the same voice that had echoed through the worst of her dreams, when she saw him forever on her front porch, tugging the flaps of his shirttails, bringing her the bad news.

From the top of Holland Street, she recognized Lem's battered blue station wagon sitting, as it so often had, in front of their house, the front wheels angled against the curb in case he forgot to set the brake again. The house itself, the cracked driveway, the side alleys and surrounding houses all looked strange and unfamiliar, the lawns overgrown more than she remembered, the faded stop sign on the corner replaced with a new one. Even the street seemed too narrow, the houses crowding one another for space. Her hands shook, her chest almost too tight for breathing.

“You look like you need three or four drinks,” Max said. He pulled the truck to the side of the road, letting it ease slowly down the block. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Well, no. Not exactly. Two drinks might do it.”

“This whole deal is pretty weird, huh?” He lit a cigarette and tossed the match out the window.

She nodded, tugged the ends of her hair. “To say the least.”

“Afraid you might run into him?”

“Who?”

“Your ex. He probably got the same phone call, right?”

Her stomach tightened. “I don't think he's here,” she said.

Eventually, she would tell him. She
had
to. The poor guy—already she was somebody else who had trouble delivering the straight truth to him. But she knew, too, that the thing she liked best about Max right now was that he
didn't
know about her the way the rest of Wiley Ford did. And so she had called him that morning, apologizing for what happened in her garage two days ago, asking him for a ride to Cumberland, asking him to come back. It all felt so clean, having no real past in the eyes of this person. She could lose herself in her newness to him, fold herself into the void of her presence with him. Clean, bright, uncomplicated. All the mess of herself hacked away and hidden, no blood, no dripping guilt. Like a magic trick, her weighty past gone in the flash of his gaze. And she allowed that gaze, felt it lingering on her face, on her breasts when he thought she wasn't looking. He flirted with her in his own blunt way, brought the heat of sex into the room with him, when everyone else she knew brought only the chill of politeness. How could she think of ending that with confession?

They were close enough now that she could see her old house, the rusted roof bracket meant to hold the cutout Santa Claus Marty had made, the forsythia under the front windows overgrown and tangled, the fake alarm-system stickers peeling in the corners of the windows. Their car, an old Honda Civic that Marty had bought at an auction, sat at the back of the driveway, hidden under a green tarp.

“Why don't I come with you?” Max said. “See what all the fuss is about?”

Actually, she wondered, too, what all the fuss was about. Lem didn't say much in person, and even less on the phone. And last night when he'd called, the only thing she could get out of him was that there “was trouble with the house,” that she'd “best come see.” She'd told him she would try to make it out the next day.

“Try?” Sarah had said. “This is your
home
we're talking about. You have to go.”

“Lem can take care of it,” she said. Lem had watched the house for her all this time, had mowed the grass once or twice in the summer, adjusted the heat when a freeze threatened the pipes. There was no mortgage; the house had belonged to Marty's parents, who'd bought it in 1947 for two thousand dollars.

But Sarah wouldn't drop the idea, had kept hounding Alison, telling her she could not turn her back on her own home, could not turn her back on Lem. And in this she was right, Alison knew, as much as she did not want to go back there. Finally, she'd agreed to let Max take her the short hop across the river and back into Maryland, then pick her up a few hours later. Enough, she figured, to satisfy Sarah.

But now she wasn't so sure. She looked out the truck window at the house, her hand frozen on the door handle. Lem sat on the front stoop, looking at his fingernails as he chewed them down to nothing.

“Three hours?” she asked Max.

He shook his head. “Told you on the phone, I'm headed to Hagerstown. It'll be five at least. I'll hurry if you want.”

She nodded, drew a long breath. “Yeah, I want.”

Everyone she had ever come into contact with, it occurred to her once, was known mostly for one thing, identified that way. Mr. Beachy was a devout Christian. Sarah loved dance. Bill believed in most anything unexplained or unproven. Marty had liked to repair and build. Her father flew radio-controlled airplanes. Her mother organized all the local blood drives. Mr. Rossi knew trivia. Even herself…she was the Tragic Widow for a long while; by now she'd probably graduated to the Corvette Lady. Lem was no exception. People in Cumberland who had no idea of his name had known him for twenty-plus years as the
Star Wars
Guy. In 1978, he was in the newspaper for seeing the movie 129 times, a record in all of Maryland. He still carried that identity around with him, still kept old movie posters and framed articles on the wall of his house trailer, still wore
Star Wars
T-shirts and hats. He wore one now, with Darth Vader on the front, half-hidden under his work shirt.