Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (6 page)

Alison laughed a little and Sarah smiled. “What does he say to your stomach?”

“He kneels down and says, ‘Hi in there. Daddy's here.'” She swallowed. “Things like that.”

“Oh, man.” Alison glanced down at her sister's stomach, imagining the words vibrating inside. “You know you should have told me all of this.”

Sarah stiffened. “Yeah, that would've been nice. Too bad, huh?” She pinched her lips together and banged the water faucet off, then wheeled on Alison. “That is
exactly
what I wanted. To pick up the phone some afternoon and call you up and picture you sitting in your kitchen, leaning on the butcher block and putting the ends of your hair in your mouth the way you do, and I could just spill the whole damn thing. Instead, we sneak around to doctor's appointments, not wanting to burden you with anything else.”

Her face flushed, and she flinched a little under Alison's touch, and Alison saw all at once that Sarah was not upset, not verging on tears, just angry.

Sarah shook her head. “But you weren't there, Ali. You were here. Do you see? You were here sitting on the porch and here crying by the lake and here pacing the halls at night and so I couldn't tell you, not any of it. You were just
too
here, in this house. Too unavailable.”

Alison didn't know what to say. She let all of this sink in for a minute. “You want me to apologize because my husband died?”

“No, Ali. I want you to go home. Five months ago, I wanted you to stay here forever. Now I want you home. That phone call from Ernie today … I really thought you would just take a deep breath and say, ‘Okay.' I mean, you have a
‘project'
going? How about having a
life
going? Like the rest of us.”

Alison eyes started to burn. “A year was supposed to be the deadline, right? That's what all those stupid books say. ‘Sorry, time's up. Feel all better now.'” Alison stopped talking, waved her hand in front of her face. She wondered how many times Sarah and Bill had talked about this. Or Sarah and Ernie, for all she knew. Maybe the whole town and everyone she knew, wondering when she would finally buck up and stand strong and pull herself up by her bootlaces and all those other phrases that were supposed to have kicked in by now. Problem was, she didn't feel any of it.

“A year? Year and a half?” Sarah said. “I don't know how much is enough time. If there's ever enough.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “It's not a deadline. It's just … You miss Marty, and we do, too, okay? But we have to miss
you
on top of it. And you aren't gone for good, that's what's so frustrating. I just want to know when you'll be back.
If
you'll be back.”

Alison looked at Sarah, at their reflections in the narrow, darkened window above the sink, and felt nearly pulled under by the weight of longing. She missed it, too, those Tuesday mornings when Sarah would call and tell her everything about the latest batch of dancers, about who had said what or fallen ill, about some elderly man hitting on her, about Bill asking her to read another book on angels or ESP, and they would laugh as her coffee cup slowly heated a white ring into the surface of the butcher block, and time passed so easily. How had it gotten so far out of her grasp? All of it gone now, not just Marty. When, Sarah had asked, would she be back?

“I'll be back when I finish the Corvette,” Alison said.

Sarah was squeezing out the sponge, wiping the area around the sink. She scrubbed harder, shaking her head. “You have a job, students, a house,
us
. But you're pinning everything on that damn stupid car.” Just when it seemed she was gathering herself up for another barrage, she sagged back against the counter. She looked, Alison thought, tired. Just tired. “Then you'd better get busy,” Sarah told her. “That thing is a disaster area.”

Even after she and Bill installed a new battery, nothing—not the engine or the headlights or the radio—worked.

“Electrical,” Bill said, nodding. “You got those mice in there, they chew the wires.”

Alison looked at him, then back at the exposed engine of the car. A wad of twigs and paper scraps lay tangled in one corner, and on top of the big iron block, oil puddled in the depressions. The bundles of wires were everywhere. Wires, belts, hoses. It bore almost no resemblance to those careful drawings in her manual.

“Mice eat wires?” She hadn't heard the clawing noises since that first night. “Why would they do such a thing?”

“Well, I don't think they have any particular motivation.” He shrugged. “Their nature. Mice chew up our phone lines all the time.”

“That's not fair,” she said. Bill laughed and so did she, but in a way, she meant it. For the past three nights she'd stayed up late, sitting on a stepladder in the garage, reading her new manual, trying to absorb all the instructions and procedures. But there was no mention anywhere of
mice
, no photos showing teeth marks in wires. Her problem already was in figuring out where to jump into all the mess, some way to get a handle on it. How much harder would that be if she had to worry about mice destroying the car from the inside out? She took comfort in thinking of the men with the white lab coats, imagining them as benevolent doctors, restoration scientists. She wanted to be like them, the way they made it all look so effortless, how they smiled in every photo.

Late that afternoon, unannounced, Mr. Kesler dropped by with his son, Max. She heard them before she saw them, their low voices as they walked toward the garage. Mr. Kesler knocked on one of the rough boards.

“Alison? I'd like to introduce you to Max here.” He indicated his son with a pat on the shoulder, as if she might have missed him standing there. She shook his hand.

“The percussionist, right?” she said. “Gene Krupa minus the heroin.” He laughed, his tiny glasses angled down his nose.

“Yeah, according to Dad. I call myself a freelance munitionist.” He dug around in his jeans pocket and handed her one of his cards, which had his name and a PO box number, along with a little cartoon of Yosemite Sam igniting a powder keg.

“Freelance, huh?” she said. “I'd guess most of your work is commissioned.” She stuck the card in her pocket.

“Except when I'm practicing. Then it's just vandalism.” He had one of those narrow smiles, she couldn't tell if he were joking or not.

“I'm going inside to set up,” Mr. Kesler said, his white gloves tucked into the pocket of his jumpsuit.

“The dance isn't for another hour, Gordon,” she said.

He shrugged. “I'm here now. Records could stand a cleaning.”

She smiled at him. “The early Mr. Kesler.” He paused a moment, looking at the two of them, then turned to go inside.

“He seems really proud,” Alison said. “A son who blows things up.”

“He'd be prouder if I were a forty-five of Shorty Rogers,” he said. “And anyway, I don't really blow them up.” As he spoke he moved around the car. He had his father's habit of nervously licking his lips. “I just take out the base, the supports or foundation for whatever structure, hold my breath, and let it fall. I just teach things about gravity.”

“What a coincidence. I teach students about history,” she said, though it wasn't exactly true anymore.

He nodded, then pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboros and lit one. “Good for you.”

“You know, I've seen your work on TV,” she said. “Buildings and bridges coming down. Your father told us about the skyscraper in Brazil.”

He leaned into the engine bay, cigarette in his mouth. “I wish,” he said. He bounced the car on its shocks, and Alison noticed on his upper arm a tattoo of the same Yosemite Sam drawing he had on his business card. “That's the Alfonsi family,” he said. “They did the Caldera Building in Brazil, thirty-six stories. I just do silos, a few stone bridges, small-town stuff. I did the library in Charleston two years ago. Came down in three and a half seconds. Laid it down like a little baby.”

“So, your father's confused.”

He laughed, flicked ashes away from the car. “Yeah, I guess you could put it that way.”

She wondered what he meant by this, but probably it was none of her business. “And now you get to teach the Wiley Ford dam about gravity?”

He bent down to look beneath the car, his blond crew cut shimmering and angled, like hammered metal.

He straightened, grinned. “That,” he said, “I'm just going to blow up.” Before she could ask, he said, “No supports as such. It's just a big stone wall. Just, boom—down.”

She nodded, wondering suddenly what he was
doing
here, if this was Sarah's awkward stab at some kind of blind date. “So, where did you get your munitionist's degree?”

He pulled a bandanna from his pocket and wiped his fingers, stamped out his cigarette on the dirt floor, then picked up the butt and put it in his pocket. “Fort Dix. I wanted to be a photographer when I was growing up. Won a Brownie camera in a contest for picking best name for the Munsters' car. Second place. After that, I took photos of every neighbor, the neighbors' dogs, the dogs' fleas. Every damn thing. I wanted to work for
National Geographic
and take pictures of the first man to cross the Arctic Circle on foot, or whatever.” He wiped each finger carefully, like his father wiping his record albums. “You ever think about that? If that guy is supposed to be the first across, but the photographer is there to take his picture doing it, then he's really the
second
one across, right?” He stopped, as if he really wanted her to answer this.

“Second. I guess you're right. He should only win the Brownie camera.”

“So the captions are bullshit, right? Anyway, the recruiter told me the U.S. Army has the best photography schools in the world.” Max shrugged. “He was less than truthful.”

She laughed. “And you were more than gullible.”

“I was eighteen. After my discharge, I kicked around for a while. Sold my darkroom equipment, wanted to be an inventor, own my own business. Lived with a woman who didn't like me very much. A string of bad ideas.”

Alison looked away, thinking of all those weekend projects Marty had done with Lem, the folding ladder they'd tried to invent, the welding cart half-finished, all their plans that came, finally, to nothing. Blown money. Dead ends. A short life wasted in a damp basement.

“So, what'd you name it?” she asked.

“What?”

“The Munsters' car.”

“Oh, that. I called it the Ghoul Mobile.”

“That won second? How many entries were there, two?”

Max smirked. “Hey, listen,” he said. “Three hundred bucks.”

“What?”

“Sorry it's not more, but in all honesty, I'll just sell parts, then scrap the rest.”

She looked at him a moment. “This car isn't for sale. I don't know where you got the idea…”

Max shook his head and looked at the garage ceiling. “My ‘confused' father, that's where,” he said. “He said he wanted me to see about your car. I just thought…” He spread his hands open before him.

“Well, sorry, but this one I'm restoring. I just started.”

“You're restoring
this
car?”

His tone annoyed her. “No, one of the other cars in here. The blue one in the third row.”

He half-laughed. “Hey, good luck is all I have to say on that. I hope you have a big fat bank account. And the patience of Job teaching PE in junior high. You're going to need it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well … Alison, right? This car…it's a goner. It's terminal. It's on life support. I mean, call in the priest, okay? The money you're going to have to spend, you could buy a nice
running
Vette. A better model, too, a more desirable year.”

A more desirable year?
This sounded so strange, she nearly forgot her annoyance. “What do you know about it anyway?” she said. “Have you blown up Corvettes in your time?”

He ran his hand along his crew cut, pushed up his glasses. “I've spent a little time working on cars. I think that's what Dad must've meant. Help you out some.”

“Tell him I said great idea. So far you've been a godsend.”

“Hey, sorry. Just trying to save you a little bother and money.”

Alison felt her face warming. She imagined the ride home for the two of them, Max describing in detail the car's ruin, the piles of rust, the torn interior. She saw them laughing over her stupid plan, pitying her futility. And she saw herself never finishing the car. What would she tell Sarah then? What would she tell herself? Maybe his description of the car fit her, as well: a goner, a terminal case.