Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (22 page)

“Be fourteen,” Max said as he looked up at her.

“Pardon me?”

“Be fourteen,” he said again, smiling.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, seven,” he said.

“Let me guess,” Alison said,
“Readers Digest
is teaching you encryption.”

“Bingo,” he said. “I mean, no, not that.”

By now she was smiling, too. “Are you drunk?”

“Not yet. I'm just asking you out. I want to go to the church hall tonight, play a little bingo.”

“You do? I thought you hated all the small-town crap.”

“Not bingo. My mother and I used to go all the time. I rock at bingo.” He scrubbed a part, then wiped his fingers.

“I didn't know it was possible to rock at bingo.”

He smiled. “Well, then, you've got a few things to learn.”

St. Patrick's hall was crowded with banners and people, the former because of Founders' Day events and the latter because of the special one-thousand-dollar bonus game. Several people from the dance class were there, and it was strange to see them outside of Sarah's living room, strange to see them eating hot dogs and enjoying a regular life. Folding tables stretched the length of the hall, leaving little room for the coffee drinkers huddled around the concession area. Smokers were herded into a loft area upstairs, where the bingo caller sat in a corner with his microphone and ball machine, announcing numbers and lighting them up on a big scoreboard—like God, dealing out the evening's fate. Alison sat beside Max, the two of them manning five cards between them, covering them with the little cardboard disks as the numbers were called. The games moved with what felt like blistering speed, and there were endless variations—four corners, round-robin, fifty-fifty. Some of the ladies (as most of the players were) around and across from them managed a dozen or more cards, forsaking the cardboard disks and using fat Hi-Liters to mark their numbers. The smells of hot dogs and pizza and cigarettes became the warm odor of anticipation as the numbers echoed and flashed, culminating every ten minutes or so in the familiar shouts and the little buzz of excitement surrounding the winner. Every so often, the action would taper off into a lull, the game would halt, and God (actually, Benny Pappas from Joe and Benny's Pizza) would make announcements of anniversaries, or sick people to be remembered in prayer, or the next dance at the fire hall. Sometimes he would pick on individual people in the crowd (in this way, Alison thought, he
was
kind of like God), singling them out for teasing about their new car or new hairstyle or aftershave.

The person directly across from them, a woman with penciled-in eyebrows and the smoothest skin Alison had ever seen, took advantage of the lull to rearrange the good-luck shrine she had set up around her place, a complex heap of teddy bears, Beanie Babies, rosary beads, and photos of her grandchildren. Alison leaned back in her folding chair, holding Max's hand. Lila Montgomery waved from across the hall. Tyra Wallace made her way down from the smokers' loft to hug them both, and Max bought them Cokes and hot dogs. Benny Pappas announced that Crystal and Jeremy Engle's baby was doing better and would be home soon from the hospital and that Denton Jamison had left his headlights on in the parking lot.

“And speaking of cars,” Benny said, his voice a muffled echo, “I suspect our local law-enforcement friends best have their ticket books at the ready when a certain hotshot Corvette is soon speeding through town.”

Alison reflexively laughed with the rest before realizing he was talking about
her
Corvette. Every player from the two tables around them had turned to look, smiling. Max squeezed her hand under the table.

“You're just hoping I'll take you for a ride,” she shouted up to Benny, and everyone laughed again.

“Oh, I think that seat will be occupied,” Benny said in his most leering voice. It was Max's turn to blush. As new as she and Max were, she realized, their story had already been set down in the mind of the town, already written and familiar. The lonely young widow marries the handsome munitions expert. Frieda Landry could have written it. Alison remembered how she'd anticipated missing the car, missing AAAA and Mr. Beachy, knowing that change took everything away. But really, what did she know? Did she know more than an entire town, more than the years that had given them a religion built on repetition, a God who let someone win every game? She saw herself then for how she'd been these past twenty-three months, viewing the town as beneath her for all its provinciality, a town that had lost hundreds to wars and a few more each week to the ordinary ways of dying—she'd thought she knew loss better, knew it more, took it to her empty bed each night. But loss had pulled her out of her life, while the town kept moving on, kept imagining its own existence, its own life—like some fairy-tale creature, dreaming itself into being. It was a town built on quiet belief—that the tourists would show up, that Gordon's car was down there somewhere, that her Corvette would soon draw speeding tickets. Not a bad way to live a life—write your stories out of what you imagine, and imagine out of whatever past sustains your future. If you missed one or two, if the tourists didn't show, then you'd played enough cards to win the next one, or the next. Her failure with Marty had been a failure of this same kind of imagination, their unwillingness to foresee a future of happiness, and in that unwillingness the further unwillingness to carve out a space in which that happiness might occur. Already, in the eyes of the town, she and Max were speeding through town in a shiny Corvette, wedding rings on their fingers, their children filling the elementary school and trying out for peewee football. She could imagine a worse future. Could, but—for now—didn't.

They jumped back into another round of bingo, and Max even won twenty-five dollars on one of the quickie games. They kissed, and Benny Pappas, missing nothing, embarrassed them all over again. Just as they settled in with their cards for a new game, there was a small flurry of commotion by the front door.

“Hold the phone and stop the presses,” Benny nearly shouted through the mike. “Here's the man of the hour.”

“Who?” Max said. They both looked back in time to see Gordon—once again, the late Mr. Kesler—walking through the entrance, carrying a paper Food Lion sack and dressed not in his usual jumpsuit but in a plaid sport coat and orange shirt, a porkpie hat on his head. He looked like he was there to sell everyone a used car.

“For those of you who didn't read this morning's paper,” Benny announced, “be sure and talk to Gordon tonight and ask him what's what.”

“What
is
what?” Max said, turning to Alison. She felt her face warming, her eyes burning.

“A little of Gordon's past, and, I might add, our very own past, came out of that lake yesterday,” Benny said. “A part that's soon, I understand—am I right on this, Tilda?—to find its way into the Mineral County museum.”

As if it were scripted, Gordon reached into the paper sack and withdrew one of the chromed hubcaps, waving it above his head and beaming, the hubcap shining under the lights. Some of the people there applauded, while Gordon collected backslaps and handshakes.

“I don't get it,” Max whispered. “What is that?”

The woman with the penciled-in eyebrows leaned across the table. “Congratulations,” she said to Max.

“It's a car part,” Alison said.

“Not your Corvette…” He looked genuinely confused, and in that second Alison knew that Mr. Kesler had lied to her about Max hiring Tanner Miltenberger, about wanting to “tighten the screws.”

“No, not my Vette.” She could hardly breathe. “Uncle Crawford's Chrysler.”

Max looked back at his father, still collecting congratulations while Benny announced the last game of the night, while the hubcap made its way like a collection plate up and down the long tables.

“Not possible,” Max said. “He's lying. That thing didn't come out of the lake.”

“Well, yes, he's lying, but also yes, it came out of the lake.” The warmth and smoke smell and noise settled over her, pressing her down, sticking her shirt to her back. She felt the hot dog and Coke churning her stomach.

“Alison, there's no Chrysler
down
there, just an old, old lie.” He looked, for half a second, as if he doubted this assertion, as if, like the rest of the town, he wanted to be pulled into believing.

She leaned in to whisper. “The parts are down there because he put them down there. He threw them in so people could find them.”

Above them, Benny called out, “I-forty-three,” and the players marked their cards.

“How do you know about this?” Max said.

She looked at him. It's such a small thing, she wanted to say. Just an old man's story, just let it be.

“He told me,” she said. Her own lie.

“B-twenty-three,” Benny called. Clouds from the smokers up in the loft spun in slow wisps around the arc lights.

“Why?” Max said. Across his shoulder, she saw Gordon heading in their direction, smiling, carrying his hubcap in both hands like a salver.

“No, he didn't tell me.” She shook her head. “Max, this whole thing…it's just so
mindless
. I mean, what's the point?”

“He told you and he didn't tell you? Which is it, Alison?”

Gordon slowly made his way down the aisle toward them, stopping now and then to show the hubcap to someone else. Benny called, “G-nineteen,” and flashed it on the board.

“I helped him,” she said as evenly as she could. “He had a whole box of parts and I helped him throw them in.”

He drew back to look at her. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“I don't know.” She shook her head again. “It was a whim; I thought I was helping.”

Max's face had grown tight and hard, his round glasses reflecting the arc lights.

“Tell them,” he said. “Tell everyone—her—” He pointed to the woman with the Beanie Babies and teddy bears. “Tell her right now what you just told me.” His voice grew louder.

“Max, please…”

“Tell her it's a lie.” A muscle throbbed in his jaw.

“Why does it matter?” she said. She reached out, expecting him to draw back. Instead, he took her hand and held it flat on his palm to examine it, her hand some found object, a vaguely interesting rock. He set her hand back on her leg.

“If you don't understand that,” he said, “then you don't understand a thing about me.”

He stood up to leave just as Gordon reached them with the hubcap.

“Your old man made the paper yet again, son,” Gordon said. He offered the hubcap, and Max took it. From where she sat, Alison saw his face reflected in the chrome, curved and distorted, a portable fun-house mirror. The name
CHRYSLER
, stamped in red, cut across the middle of his rounded face.

“That's really nice, Dad,” he said. What else could he say? The whole town thought it was nice, too, the nicest thing that had happened to them in a long time.

“You see that?” Max held the hubcap out to her, she saw herself reflected in it, the entire room behind her held in that curve of polished steel. “What do you have to say about that?”

She could say to everyone here—stand up, as in class, and lecture—that somehow a myth could look like only a cheap lie to someone, while it held great truth for someone else, like those optical illusions where the drawing is both a skull and a beautiful lady. She could tell Max to let it go and stop torturing himself with the past, tell Gordon the same thing, ask for a show of hands,
how many here had shitty fathers?
, ask God in his corner how it was that a single betrayal could be so small and weigh so much, could be held in nothing more than a junkyard scrap that in turn could hold the whole town in its shiny face. But God had just called the winning number again, and a small whirlwind of celebration stirred near the back, while the rest tossed their used cards in quiet defeat. It was the last game of the night. Alison said nothing as Max turned and walked out. Gordon strode into the mingling crowd with his hubcap. Benny Pappas shut down the scoreboard and drew a canvas cover over the ball machine, putting away his deification for the night. Back to earth, back to making pizzas, back to being human again.

Days passed with no word from Max, days in which she kept calling his cell phone, imagining it ringing out in that big empty ballroom, echoing its beeping little tune. Mr. Kesler had been all over town making appearances, had been asked to cut the ribbon at the opening of Flow Motor's new service center, posed for pictures at the Mineral County museum, and had spoken to a group of Cub Scouts as part of the Founders' Day festivities—he and his hubcap, as if they were Hollywood's brightest new couple. Finally, she gave up on Max's phone, went to the Red Bird and loaded up on coffee, and headed to Mr. Beachy's to prepare for a long night of work. She noticed on the way that
DISCOUNT RAGE
had fixed the burned-out neon tubes only to have others go bad, so that the sign now read
DISCO BEVERAGE
.