Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (31 page)

“May I ask you a question or three?” Frieda said. Practiced, this little joke an old one.

“Sure,” Max said. “I guess so.” He still held Alison's hand under the table, and she felt him nervously working her fingers.

“Your father…” Frieda smiled and touched her neat hair, and Alison thought,
please, please go away, please leave us alone
. “He's quite the something, isn't he?” Frieda said.

Max glanced at Alison. “That he is.”

“I suppose you have grown up with hearing about the lake car all your life?” She withdrew her little leatherette spiral notebook and a thin gold pen.

Max gripped Alison's hand under the table, squeezing. Alison felt her heart expanding, thudding against her bones.

“All my life,” Max said. “Since day one.”

For some reason, Frieda wrote this down. “And have you heard there will be a special display at the county museum, all about the Kesler Chrysler? Right next to those mannequins dressed like miners, and all those pictures of Coalville. They kind of go along with each other.”

Max pinched his lips together. “No, I hadn't heard that.”

Frieda frowned at her notebook, apparently frustrated that she wasn't getting better quotes. “As his only son, you must be awfully proud of him. A local folk hero, really.”

“Well,” Max said, his fingers working, “since the story is so familiar to me, I don't have much to say about it. Alison here, though, she has some brand-new insights into the whole thing.” He looked at her evenly, and her heart jumped up, her pulse noisy inside her ears.

“Insights?” Frieda said. “What sort of insights?”

Alison looked back across the table at him and barely shook her head. He squeezed her hand hard, squeezed her fingers together, held her gaze.
Amends
. The word circled back toward her from several nights before.

“She knows' the truth about the Kesler Chrysler,” Max said. “The real, honest truth. Think your readers might be interested in that?”

“Yes, of course,” Frieda said. “Certainly.” She scooted her chair toward Alison.

Don't do this
, Alison thought. Max patted her hand now, the way you might encourage a child—
go ahead and just tell the truth
, and she wanted the truth just as badly as he did, wanted a truth that meant that her husband's memory had forgiven her enough that she could fall in love with a man, make a life out of moving forward. A life of restoration, of rebuilding. Every nut and bolt and washer.

“You…” She looked at Frieda, the pale blue of her eyes. “You mentioned ‘folk hero,'” Alison said, “and that's an apt way to put it.” Max rubbed her hand, patted it. He smiled.
Go on
. He wanted her to be his, to love him enough to dig him out of all those lies. “Like, say, Paul Bunyan is a folk hero. Or—”

Frieda smiled. “Or Johnny Appleseed.”

“Well, actually Johnny Appleseed isn't the best example of the…of the type of mythmaking I'm talking about.” She felt herself picking out words, stepping around meaning, self-conscious, the way she felt in class.

Frieda shook her head, writing. “What's wrong with Johnny Appleseed?”

“John Chapman actually lived,” Alison said. “He actually did travel and spread seeds across the wilderness.”

“Well”—Frieda gave a little bark of disgust—“I believe your father actually
lived
, did he not?” she said to Max. “Or was he just a spook all these years?”

He nodded and rubbed Alison's hand under the table. Patting her, stroking her.
You're doing fine
. “I think she means the claims he made, not the fact that he lived.”

“Johnny Appleseed?”

“No,” Alison said. “Gordon. Mr. Kesler.” When she said it, his name felt all wrong in her mouth. She saw him the way he'd been that night at the lake, his eyes blackened, a happy bandit, stealing nothing more than another few weeks of attention. She wanted this to stop.

Frieda's face flushed deep pink, her faint instinct for story suddenly informing her, it seemed, that she was onto what amounted in Mineral County to a scoop.

“Aren't you a college professor?” she asked Alison.

“Well…” Yes and no was not a good answer, Alison knew.

“Yes,” Max said, and laced his fingers with hers. “She is.”

“And what you want to tell me about Gordon Kesler is that you have a reason for saying that he didn't do with that car everything he said he did?”

The question was so baffling in the way it was asked that Alison spent a moment trying to unravel it, Max looking at her, Frieda looking at her. But finally, the phrasing of the question didn't matter all that much. The truth, she told herself. That's what matters. He squeezed her hand.

“No,” she said as Frieda scratched lines with her pen. “No, he didn't.”

Everything goes away, eventually. This she knew above all else, lying in her room that night, hearing the TV click off, Sarah and Bill readying for bed. Everything disappears, the world a black blanket spread out then folded over and over by invisible hands, every person and object and era eventually vanishing under its folds. The house fell into silence, and Alison pulled her own blankets up over her head, as if trying out oblivion, as if by knowing it, she might avoid it. But that never happened, and someday the black blanket would enfold her, too. She fell asleep thinking this, dozed fitfully, awoke just after dawn with the hollow
plop
of the newspaper landing on the porch, and she knew then. Knew that Frieda Landry's article would be in the paper that morning, that after she'd left yesterday, she had driven straight to the office down on Main Street and submitted it, quick to get away with her first-ever scoop, quick to get away from Alison, who had, after all, deceived the entire town, or aided and abetted the deception. Only her crime was the more grievous, because she was an outsider, she knew, and not one of their own.

She awoke fully in her bed, alone, Max having gone back the day before, after their breakfast with Frieda Landry, and after they'd finished the time line and spent some time under the Vette, and taken a long walk around the lake. They hadn't said much and had touched only a little; she couldn't help thinking that now that he'd gotten what he wanted from her—enough truth to bring his father down—maybe all the rest was superfluous.

She stood and looked out through her curtains. The lake was up, only the roofs of the town showing, the stone bridge reduced to its backbone, the banks slowly receding. Colaville had gone away twice now, aging unseen. The lake had gone away and come back, but would go away for good someday. Max had gone away with a promise to return, Mr. Kesler in vanity or ego. Mr. Rossi had gone away as a trivia question and come back as a box of ashes, which Sarah, lacking a mantel, had placed on top of the entertainment unit. Come Saturday, the Hotel Morgantown would go away in a cloud of dust and explosion. The Corvette was going away slowly, in decay. Marty had gone away in the violence of an accident, and come back as an imagined ghost, preoccupied in her basement. Lem and Pammy had gone away in the dissolution of a friendship, Mr. Beachy in the dissolution of commerce, Bill's hopes of magic in the blank face of reality.

Enough light of a new day drew familiar sounds from the house, Bill and Sarah rushing about, making breakfast, the front door closing, the radio reciting the school lunch menus and the weather. A few minutes later, Sarah called her down.

“Have you seen this?” Sarah said, rattling the paper in her fist, then tossing it on the table. She looked fatigued and pale.

Alison sat at the kitchen table to put on her socks and shoes. Bill smiled and downed his coffee, then went out the door to work, probably sensing an argument unfolding. Alison looked over the Style page of the newspaper, but Frieda's column wasn't there. Instead, it was on the first page of the Region section, right beside the list of arrests for drunk driving:
LOCAL PROFESSOR SETS RECORD STRAIGHT ON LAKE MYTH
. One quote from Alison had been highlighted in bold print, “Many such myths find permanence because people want to believe. Someone puts on a Bigfoot costume, and someone else takes his picture.” Had she really said that? She sounded so…finicky, pedantic. The whole time she'd spoken to Frieda, she'd tried to step around her own words, as though vagueness might lift her past what she was actually saying. The article described, in Frieda's usual thesaurus-driven style, the way that Mr. Kesler had invented the story (“an elaborate facade”) and had planted the car parts (“a nocturnal transgression”). Frieda had not even bothered, Alison realized now, to implicate her in all of this, even though she had admitted to it yesterday. Better, probably, if your source was not one of the criminals. This version of events had been verified in interviews with Max Kesler, who had, the article noted, corroborated the professor's account.
Corroborated
. How he must have loved that word.

Alison folded the paper, sighed, and looked at her other sock still bunched up on the floor. What had she done? Now that the whole thing was in print, it looked awful. A blind-side attack on an old man, cheered on by his only son.

“How could you do this?” Sarah rattled the paper again.

“I don't know,” Alison said. “Max was there … I thought I was telling the truth.”

“Well, for godsake, Ali. If we plan to run around exposing people's lies, the
Press-Republican
is going to start looking like the New
York Times.”

“It meant a lot to Max.…” She drank the coffee Sarah poured for her. “It's the
truth
, you know? You're supposed to think telling the truth is a good thing, right? Isn't this the message we got as children?”

Sarah frowned. “We also got the one about being polite. About not coming off like the Lone Genius of West Virginia riding in to educate the ignorant.”

Although Sarah was one of the least qualified to lecture on politeness, Alison knew she was right. She sounded horrible in the article, dissecting the truth, trimming away the lies. Cold and methodical. The professor, in academic gown and mortarboard, big round owl glasses, using her pointer to indicate where the town's stupidity lay. And how had Max escaped almost all mention? He'd been sitting right there, nodding his head, turning the conversation toward Alison, yet his name only came up once, at the end of the article. The corroborator.

Alison shook her head. “I blew it. I'm sorry. Everyone is going to hate me.”

Sarah put a clean bowl and a box of cereal on the table. “I won't hate you. But if you go to the paper with any of
my
lies, you're going to have a fight on your hands.”

That afternoon she spent polishing the Corvette's seats with saddle soap, vacuuming the carpets with a spray-on cleaner, cleaning the glass and mirrors. It didn't look half-bad when she was done, only one small tear in the leather seats, which she fixed with rubber cement. She stood back, sweating, admiring her work, knowing it was only more dressing up, more rouge on the body of the car. The lake was full enough now to send the sun reflecting off it in all directions, to ripple across its surface when the wind blew. She'd heard nothing from Max all day, nothing about the article, or about the car, or about her. Nothing. On the wall of her garage was Mr. Rossi's last testament, as she'd come to think of it, his arcane list of nine theses tacked to the wall with nails she'd found on the bench. She'd read them over several times, his one disciple, and read them again now, absently, as she picked up the cordless phone and called the chain store body shop in Cumberland—the one she'd been warned away from for their shoddy work, the one Mr. Beachy called “El Cheapo's” (about the meanest thing she'd ever heard him say)—to find out that they could respray the car for about a hundred bucks. Not a real paint job, but from ten feet away, you probably couldn't tell the difference. Black, she told the man on the phone. The blackest black you have.

That night was the second dance class they'd had since Mr. Rossi had died, not because anyone really wanted to dance, Sarah said, but because they wanted someplace to go. Alison had just gotten done with showering and cleaning the grease from under her nails. They spoke in low whispers, as if they were at a funeral instead of just in the presence of Mr. Rossi's ashes, though as she listened from upstairs, she figured out that it was not his presence in the house that silenced them so, but hers. Her name drifted up the stairs with the clink of coffee spoons and saucers, and she sat on the top stair and listened, straining at the words the way she had as a kid when her parents were downstairs having some minor argument, or when Sarah was downstairs with a boy. She closed her eyes to hear better, afraid to go down and face them, afraid of the attention, and beneath the sound of the talking and the pouring of coffee and of Bill's quiet laugh and Mrs. Skidmore's loud one, there was another sound she almost recognized but couldn't quite. And then she did: careful footsteps on the carpet, like her own, late at night. She opened her eyes, and there stood Lila Montgomery, her jeans neatly pressed, her loafers flashing pennies.

“You can join the party, the sad party,” Lila said. “We don't bite. Not at our age.”

“Bite, stomp, kick. I'd better stay here.”

“I was just on my way to the ladies', not hunting you down, Alison.” Her hair looked perfect, like cotton candy.

Alison nodded. “But it's pretty bad, the whole thing. They must hate me.”

Lila put her loafer on the next stair up and leaned on her knee. “Puzzlement, is the main deal. Everyone wants to know why you went to the paper. What the point was. Especially given our recent loss.” She said this delicately, a practiced grief.

Alison sighed. “It's a long story. And in my own defense, the paper came to me, more or less. I wasn't thinking, exactly.” She didn't bother mentioning that the paper had come to Max first.