Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (29 page)

When the others had left and the house was dark, she started the Vette and drove. She went the way she had the night before, out along the unfamiliar roads, past the Lift King and Jenny's Machine Tools, looping through back roads with her one headlight showing the way, pushing the car up past ninety in the straightaways, the steering wheel quaking lightly in her hands at that speed, the engine throaty and rich. She followed the road out this time, ignoring the scrapes and squeaks of the car, until she came out to a road that did look familiar, right below the bridge into Cumberland. She took it, riding into the coppery glow of the arc lamps, through the empty streets of town, past the boys who had parked their own cars in a row at 7-Eleven, showing off for no one. She tried to pretend that she had caught herself off guard by ending up in her old neighborhood, at the top of Holland Street, but really, she'd been headed here all along. She clicked off the lights and coasted to a stop in front of her house, rolled down her window to look at it. The place looked good—new paint, mulch along the walk, the gutters tacked back into place. Lem and Pammy had done so much, had made the house shine.

The last picture in the last batch Lem had sent was of a new
WELCOME
mat on the mud porch. That sweet man, trying to welcome her back to her own house. Those photos weren't ransom pictures so much as they were what Lem wanted to say to her and couldn't, what everyone had been saying to her for two years:
It's okay now, everything has been washed clean, your life is ready for you to inhabit once again
. She wished it could be so, wished that her old life could be spruced up and made ready to go, but the truth was that such a life just wasn't hers anymore and never would be. She noticed then the basement lights on, the narrow rectangle of yellow light, the windows along the foundation no bigger than loaves of bread. Marty, are you still down there? she wondered, remembering the night she'd seen him, as if he'd never gone. And she knew he was there, would always be there, that Lem and Pammy had done what they'd done to keep him there. But she could not be there. Not ever. The house was not hers anymore.

But she knew whose it was.

She had to drive for a bit to remember the way but finally found the row of trailers where Lem and Pammy had lived for as long as she'd known them. They were old-style house trailers, not like the new modulars, their wheels blocked with bricks and grown over with weeds where the mower didn't reach, their aluminum sides striped with aqua and pale pink, TV antennas propped on their roofs. Lem and Pammy's was the neatest of them all, with the small yard landscaped and trimmed, the dirt raked where the grass didn't grow, Lem's beat-up station wagon parked in the gravel beside the dark house. She found a scrap of paper and a pen in the glove compartment. Leaning on her thigh, she wrote as neatly as she could:

She folded the note in half and clicked open the storm door enough to slide it in between the two doors. Buster, their German shepherd, started scratching and whining, and as she climbed in and started the Vette, she saw a light go on in the front room. The car crunched along the gravel as she backed out, and as she slipped it into first gear, Lem's face, as big and white and blank as the moon, slid into the gap between the curtains and watched her leave.

The next day, more plans were made with Vernon Tucker, although Sarah said she was leaving Alison home this time. Mr. Rossi's pre-arrangement had short-circuited any kind of ceremony attached to his death at all. Alison could imagine him blushing from all the attention. But still it felt frustrating, the idea that he would be cremated, there would be no marker anywhere, and they would be handed that awful metal recipe box, as if it held all of him, the whole of his life. Already, Sarah had talked to Mr. Rossi's landlady, and most of his stuff would be sold at a tag sale, the proceeds to go to the Tri-State Trivial Gaming Association, of which he'd been a member for twelve years. Bill had taken half a day off from work to dish out casserole to the dancers, who still straggled by in ones or twos, seeming equally adrift without a funeral service to attend. Bill had been quiet since this whole thing had happened, had spent much of his time in his phone company uniform, as if doing penance for his earlier silliness. That's how it seemed anyway. He'd even given up his books on ancient gods and the Bermuda Triangle and Zen philosophy, trading them for evenings in front of the TV, absorbing the dull entertainment of sitcoms and football. He didn't mope or pout, never mentioned his ancient voodoo, never spoke of babies anymore. He smiled and helped with dinner and the dishes, did some work around the house, checked the progress of her Corvette—good old familiar Bill. But he wasn't quite familiar; something in him seemed broken, and, once broken, ignored.

`Lisa at F&M Bank told her the transfer of the house would be no problem, that she would draw up the papers that afternoon (Alison thought, waiting on hold, that for years she'd entrusted all of her financial dealings to someone she knew only as “Lisa”) and contact Lem and Pammy. So far, there'd been no word from either of them—maybe they had never gotten the note; maybe it had fallen into the mud or been blown away. She decided to give them the day and then call.

That afternoon into evening she spent under the Vette, trying to trace the whiff of gas she got when she walked into the garage lately. Either the tank had tiny pinholes of rust or something in the fuel pump was giving her problems. She had the radio on to take her mind off of Mr. Rossi, off the image of him forever falling off the edge of the truck, and how the others in that instant were still dancing even as he was falling, still twirling and smiling as his life on this earth was beginning its end. A man on the radio talked about paranoid government conspiracies, Pentagon cover-ups, black helicopters, and then cut away to a commercial for the Craftmatic adjustable bed. That seemed about right, seemed the best and worst of this world, the way the mundane kept shoving its nose into everything. Alison slid back on the shower curtain, her trouble light spilling shadows. The fuel tank looked fine once she'd wire brushed it, grown so oily over the years that rust never had a chance. She traced and felt along the fuel lines as well as she could, and they seemed okay, too. Must be the fuel pump; Mr. Beachy had said once he'd bet a dollar to a bag of doughnuts it would give her a problem someday. She missed him, missed leaning over the counter at AAAA. She missed Marty and Mr. Kesler and Lem and Pammy, and just as she thought to miss Max, as if she had conjured him up, he was there, calling her name with a question in his voice, knocking at the door of the garage.

“Alison?” he said again.

She slid out, the gas odor stinging her nose, and looked up at him. “Hi.”

He shook his head, rubbed his scraggle of beard. “I'm really sorry about everything. I just got caught up.”

“Caught up how? I needed you here.”

“The Hotel Morgantown is turning into a monument to bureaucracy. We've got three lawsuits already, and we haven't even blasted yet.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She sat up, leaned against the bumper of her car. “You heard about Mr. Rossi?”

“That's why I came over tonight. Part of why.” He held out his hand and pulled her up into his grasp, hugging her tightly. She held on, face against his neck.

“He was a friend of mine,” she said into that space. “Not just one of the dancers. I liked him.” She began to cry, pressing her eyes against his shoulder.

“I know. He was a nice guy. I'm sorry, Alison. What can I do?”

She let the question dissipate, and clung to him, his hand stroking her hair. Her hand came up to hold his face, and then she kissed his mouth. “Do you want to take a ride with me?” she asked.

He took a step back, holding her hands, searching her face. He looked concerned. “You mean the Vette?”

“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes with her shirttail. “It's the best. You just … I don't know…you disappear into it. I go almost every night now.”
Please say yes
, she thought.

“I smell gas,” he said. He looked at the car as if it intended to mug him.

“Fuel pump,” she said.

“A leaky fuel pump could start a fire.”

She looked away from him, sighed. “Well, it hasn't. And it's a short ride, and I'm not worried. If you are, stay here. You know, for someone who goes around blowing up things, you are an awfully cautious man.”

“That's
why
I'm cautious.”

She nodded. “I'm going. Stay or hop in.”

He considered this. “This car isn't even registered. It doesn't have tags.”

“I need
tags?”
She looked at him incredulously. “Have you ever just
done
something?”

He looked at her, saying nothing, and she got in the car, started the engine. He smiled at the sound, despite himself. Alison clicked on her one headlight and rolled past him, out of the garage and into the gravel.

In her rearview she saw him jog up behind the car and rap on the fender. She stopped and he got in.

“Where're we going?” he asked.

“Nowhere, that's the point.”

“If you say so.” He clicked his seat belt.

“Look what I found when I was cleaning up in here.” She groped under her seat.

“Pistachios?”

“Almost.” She brought up an eight-track tape, which she had found wedged under the passenger seat, the label wrinkled and distorted.

“Wow, a relic. Anybody good?”

“Well, it's Styx. Could be worse.”

“Much worse. Plug it in.”

She took the road that would bring them around the other side of the lake, driving slowly for Max, who kept his hand braced on the dash and seemed to expect, perhaps out of habit, an explosion. Usually, she liked the drive without any music, but now she needed something to fill the blankness growing between them.

She pulled over to the side of the road. “I meant to tell you, vandals got in here with bulldozers and tore your dam down, and then they got in again and built a new one.”

“I saw. They're filling the lake already.”

“So what happened?”

“I told them they ought to bulldoze it. That dynamiting would be dangerous.”

“Why?”

“Well, truth be told, I wanted out of the job. The hotel is a much bigger fish.”

She eased back onto the road. Tonight was warm, the last vestige of summer holding on. Insects kept flicking off the windshield as she drove. “Speaking of the hotel, how is Tom?” Styx started singing some song she remembered from junior high, one about Miss America.

“Tom? Oh, Tom. He's drunk almost every day. I guess that's how he is.”

She found the road that ran past the Lift King and took the sharp right out onto it, the Vette making that scraping metallic sound again. Max winced and started to say something, but she shushed him. “I feel so bad for him. One day, he's going to be just like Mr. Rossi. He's going to die, and no one will even be there to claim his ashes.”

“He has someone. He has an ex-wife or two and a daughter. He just fucked up with them; that's the story there.”

She nodded. “So he deserves to die alone, right? Fuck up once and lose all sympathy, is that how it works?”

He turned in his seat and looked at her, touched her shoulder. “You're right. I react the same as you, I think, only instead of pity, I get pissed off. Old habit.”

“Old, yes.” She turned around in the road and headed back the other way, suddenly tired, suddenly not enjoying the drive. Max took her hand, and she let him, let him kiss the tips of her fingers, though if she could have chosen right then, he would have vanished from the car and let her finish the ride alone—no Max, no music, no low-grade argument. She parked in the garage and they kissed in the dark, the leather seats squeaking with their movements. His breathing deepened and he whispered her name as she leaned into him, leaned into how familiar he felt now, even though he was still so new. She slid awkwardly across the console of the Corvette and angled herself halfway back against him, her head on his chest. It wasn't him that felt so familiar, maybe, not Max Kesler, but just the warmth of another body, the vital beat of another heart. His arms came around her slowly, his mouth pressed to her hair, his thumb tracing the outer edge of her breast. She remembered the day in the hotel, on the stage, and how she'd imagined that day that she was a woman falling in love, telling herself stories about how good it could all be if she let it. But now, though nothing had moved, things had shifted, and those stories seemed as sad as anything else that wasn't true when you really pinned it down. But still she took his hand and pulled him out of the garage, across the yard in the dark with the dew dampening their shoes, and took him quietly up the stairs, because those stories, like all stories, had their power, and she might yet believe them again, might know them as true in the middle of all that warmth and heart.

And sometime near dawn, Max breathing in the slow rhythm of sleep, something worrying the edges of her memory woke her. In the early light, she got out of bed and dug to the bottom of the hamper for her good jeans, and in the pocket of them found the paper Mr. Rossi had written for her, just days before, writing until she imagined he'd forgotten her standing there. She took the folded paper, slipped on her flannel shirt, and stole quietly down the stairs into the quiet clean of the kitchen, sat at the table, pressed the paper flat with the heel of her hand, and stared for long minutes at his final words: