The Spark and the Drive (30 page)

“It matters,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just a rumor.”

“Forget it.”

He left while I disconnected the engine and returned when I had it up on the lift, and he backed his truck carefully in underneath it. I lowered the engine to rest between two blocks of wood, and he cinched it with ratcheting tie-downs. We didn’t shake hands. He got in the truck and put the window down. “I would have paid forty thousand for that engine,” he said before he drove out of the bays.

*   *   *

The best times were the ten or fifteen minutes when Mary Ann was out of the hospital room. Nick would turn sluggishly to the sound of my voice and stare at me impersonally, as a healthy person might from twenty feet away. I told him that he and Mary Ann were more in love than anyone I knew, that soon they would have a baby, and that being a father was the best thing a man could be. I’d build to a culmination of happy circumstances, and in a way that had changed now, that was full of the best intentions, I said, “I wish I was you.”

One evening Mary Ann came out into the hallway after I knocked. She closed the door behind her.

“Did something happen?” I said.

“Can you walk with me?” she said. “I could use a coffee.”

Instead of taking the elevator down to the cafeteria, she stopped at a coffee machine and paid fifty cents for one in a little playing-card cup. “Want one?”

“I’m good.”

I was wondering why she hadn’t done this alone, to give me a chance to talk to Nick, who could nod now and grunt when I ran engine scenarios by him. He wasn’t doing more than letting me fix the problems—I don’t think he really understood most of what I was saying—but he’d lurch excitedly when I pretended to have figured them out with his help.

I was going to tell her about the twenty-five thousand, which I’d had Rod put in with the night’s deposit, but first I wanted to hear what she’d brought me out to tell me.

We hadn’t gotten far from the coffee machine when she stopped. “You made him try, Justin,” she said. “He wanted to fix the cars and he came back.”

“It was both of us,” I said.

“And now I don’t want you here anymore.”

I stared at her.

“I don’t want him to remember you. He’s my husband. He’s my baby’s father and I love him, and I don’t love you.” She said this quickly, and before I could respond she said again, “He’s my baby’s father.” For a moment I thought it was true. She didn’t know about his vasectomy. Perhaps she had convinced herself that her plan that night had worked, that he had made love to her.

“I’d never say anything—”

“If you come back I’ll hate you, Justin. Please. Don’t make me hate you.”

38.

Nick’s absence and the many delayed jobs resulted in a drop-off of business at Out of the Hole. A full day might yield three or four small external engine jobs and a handful of oil changes. Rod even suggested that we park our cars in the upper lot just to look open.

Half asleep one morning I was only vaguely aware of Rod walking around the bays with a tall man wearing an argyle sweater over a shirt and tie. He was in the lobby when I went out for a cup of the road-tar coffee Rod brewed.

“This guy wouldn’t be a bad tech,” Rod was saying, and in the silence that followed I realized he was talking about me. When I looked up, the sweatered man came forward with his hand out and said his name was Tom Greene. I gave him the mechanic salute—holding up my hand to show him that he wouldn’t want to touch it. “How do you feel about repair work?” he said as he lowered his hand.

“How do I
feel
about it?”

“Pretty much about not doing it anymore,” Rod said. “Strictly external jobs. Tune-ups, sensors, fuel injection cleaning. You’re looking at the guy who just bought the place from Mary Ann.”

Greene cleared his throat as if Rod had said something deeply flattering. “I own shops in the Precision Tune franchise,” he said. “One in New Britain, one in Meriden. We specialize in the new generation of engines.”

“What’s the point of getting buried in a fifteen-hundred-dollar overhaul,” Rod said, “when you can mash out four grand in little jobs.”

“And a significant decline in rechecks,” Greene said. “Even the dealerships are moving to a model of replacing engines rather than spending man hours repairing them. The future is customer service.”

I couldn’t say anything, so I just walked away. “I guess I stand corrected,” I heard Rod say as the door was easing closed on its piston behind me.

Half an hour later an old gray-primered panel van backed up to the bays and Bobby got out. He looked terrible, gaunt and unshaven, his hair wild even under a backwards NASCAR cap.

He walked by the lobby window holding his middle finger up to Rod as he passed. He went over to his toolbox and started pushing it toward the van. It was a tall Mac box with loose casters that kept swiveling around, and I went over and pulled the front of it while he pushed.

“That guy out there bought the shop, I guess,” I said. “He’s going to turn it into a tune-up-only place. Precision Tune.”

We got the toolbox outside and Bobby opened the back doors of the van. We pushed it right up against the bumper and then he took out a cigarette and turned around. He folded his arms and looked at the shop. “If I could I’d blow this place up right now,” he said. “You ever seen a Precision Tune? They’re bright yellow. You staying?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know anything else, but of that I was certain.

“Rod?”

“Yeah, sounds like it.”

He looked in through the lobby windows where Rod was talking animatedly to the new owner. “They make a good-looking couple,” Bobby said. He shook his head and sniffed. “You been back to see Nick?”

“Mary Ann doesn’t want me to.”

“Me either. I guess she don’t want him remembering.”

I nodded. Rod had told me the same thing.

“I never told you,” he said. “I went out to Chase Street. The Mustang was gone. He must’ve got rid of it.”

I couldn’t look at him. I started to open one of the drawers but Bobby pushed it closed. “Don’t bother,” he said, taking the long steel socket extension off the magnetic bar on the front of the box and setting it by the wheel well. Then he put the cigarette in his lips and started pushing at the top of the box until it tipped, the bumper serving as a fulcrum, and when the weight of the tools inside shifted back it slammed down into the van with the sound of a hundred windows breaking. He pushed at the bottom to slide it in and swore. “Now you can help me,” he said, and we shoved it back with everything we had until it was in just past the lip. Bobby straightened, a little out of breath. He looked past me into the parking lot, then back at the lobby. He grabbed the steel extension and strode across the lot to Rod’s Duster.

He swung the extension with both hands and hit the back window horizontally, so that when the safety glass popped and turned to pebbles, there was a level slit almost perfectly halfway up. He slammed the extension into the trunk and went to smashing out the driver’s window as Rod came running out. He knew to stop, though, which was fortunate for him, and from ten feet away he stood with his hands on his hips watching Bobby destroy his car. Tom Greene stood outside the lobby holding his head. When Bobby was finished he came back around to the van, threw the extension inside, slammed the back doors, and without a word of good-bye to me drove off, baking one of the tires up Wolcott Avenue.

That evening I, too, packed up my tools, and though my box was only half as tall as Bobby’s, I drove home with a bungee cord holding down the trunk lid. I could’ve watched April, but Mom put her back in day care with the implication that I couldn’t be completely trusted anymore. I tried to spend my days out of the house, driving around in the ’Cuda when the weather was nice, catching a matinee at the Watertown Cinema when it wasn’t.

One afternoon as I was driving north on Route 6, a green Cutlass swerved at me. There was no question but that he’d done it on purpose—in my side mirror I saw him flip me off over his roof. And then I was getting gas one day at Arco when someone passing yelled out, “Whose car you driving, punk?”

39.

On the first of December I leased a studio apartment for three hundred dollars a month in the West Rock neighborhood of New Haven, not far from Southern Connecticut State University. I just made the enrollment date for the spring semester. I sold the ’Cuda for my asking price of fifteen thousand to a middle-aged man who matched the engine and transmission numbers with a book, and I bought a ten-speed bike as my sole transportation. It was a kind of exile, making the sixty-mile trip to see Mary Ann all but impossible. Sometimes I’d go to the great gothic campus downtown and look at the Gutenberg Bible, one of only forty-eight in existence, or Van Gogh’s
Night Café,
which he gave his landlord in lieu of rent, now worth upwards of fifty million, according to the catalog.

But the high points were brief in the expanses of my depression. I was disconnected from people and unsure of how to act in the world. Alone in my apartment I let myself cry, thinking of everything I was responsible for, staring, as all felons must in their cold cells, at the maddening impossibility of going back and changing anything.

I had weekly appointments at the psychology department for a few months, but it wasn’t the right time for therapy. I had no friends, and I wanted the psychologist—an older man with kind, dark eyes and the considerate habit of pressing two fingers to his lips as he listened—to like me. I told him half-truths at best and left his softly lit office pretending to have my feet set firmly on the path of self-forgiveness.

*   *   *

On a foggy morning during spring break, while Mom was working and April was at daycare, I rode my bike to the bus stop in downtown Woodbury and took the Eastline out to Waterbury. They had bike racks at the back of the bus, and I got off and pedaled around the city under a cold sun. From across the street I saw Rod hooking up a car to one of the new oscilloscopes. The building was painted yellow, as Bobby had said it would be. I rode by Hog Wild and looked for Bobby’s car, but it wasn’t there. And then I rode out to Fulton Park, where I locked up my bike and walked down Cooke Street. My old Nova was in the driveway, along with a car I didn’t recognize. I saw people in the house moving past the windows, but I didn’t get close enough to make out their faces.

I had tried often to re-create that last night in their house. Would she have wanted him to come back after he’d pushed her off? That was the question in its entirety. In my mind, much of the night had distilled to only a few moments: when she asked why he wouldn’t touch her, and the dying sounds she made afterward. That was all I’d had for hope, that she wouldn’t want him back. That he’d gone too far this time and the pain couldn’t be healed.

But another moment that night was on her bed when she took my hand, thinking it was his.

No, there was no doubt she would have taken him back. The questions I was left with were these: Would he have been able to change, to let go of their past and start over? And if not, how much more heartbreak could she have endured?

Not much, I knew. Not much. In my heart I saw the truth. He wouldn’t have trusted the new baby not to die. He would have left her. She would have come back to me. That pristine life for us was mine now to mourn, though I couldn’t hold this in my mind for very long, a minute or so was all before the thoughts shattered, destroyed by a survival instinct like the one that keeps us from stepping too close to the edge of a cliff, though we want so badly to see. I had betrayed him in a way that is unexplained by love, that I knew couldn’t be forgiven or redeemed.

The next time I came to the house, there was a big dual-wheel U-Haul backed in the driveway. Mary Ann came out and walked past the truck toward the street. She had aged considerably, her hair, cut short now and permed, showed gray, and her face was longer and sunken—but then I realized it wasn’t her but her sister. She came up to the end of the driveway and took the mail out of the box, and there was an air of kindness in her easy movements and soft expressions that caused me to come out of hiding and hop the chain-link fence. When I saw her again she was frozen, watching me as I walked up the sidewalk.

From ten feet away I introduced myself and said that I had worked for Nick.

She smiled. “They’re inside.” She turned toward the house and walked slowly until I had caught up with her. “Justin?” she said, and she held her hand to me. “I’m Susan. The oldest sister.”

“From Washington,” I said.

On the walk, she told me that she and her husband were helping Nick and Mary Ann move back to Oregon. The news, hearing it in words—I’d assumed as much when I’d seen the truck—stunned me only for a second, and then I felt relief because there were times even now, in my new life in New Haven, when I could imagine myself losing control and taking a bus or a train out to see Mary Ann and the baby even after she had warned me not to.

Mary Ann was standing at the kitchen counter with her back to us when I followed Susan inside. “You’ve got a visitor,” Susan said, and Mary Ann, closing a box, said, “I saw through the window.”

Susan dropped the mail on the kitchen table and went off into the living room.

Mary Ann had her hair tied up pirate fashion in a bandanna. I smelled spruce and frankincense. Strength, I thought. Energy. She ran a tape gun over the box three times.

“Rod told me what you did with the engine,” she said. “Thank you. We needed the money.”

“Do you need more? I sold my car.”

“We’re okay,” she said, her back to me still. “We’re moving in with my parents for a while. They’ve got the room.” She was wearing an enormous burnt orange sweater that had elastic sewn in where it came down mid-thigh like the mouth of a sack on her dark blue leggings. She turned finally, and the effect on me was this: a great fist to the gut, and then a stopping of time that allowed me to examine her as if she were a picture. Her face was rounder and lovelier—from the effort of packing and lifting or just from the fact of being late in her pregnancy, there was a blush in her cheeks and forehead—and her breasts were someone else’s, and of course the gravity that pulled my eyes down was her belly, and it was true, it was never true until I saw her, and now that it was true, she was carrying a baby that was half my baby, I fell back against the door. I tried to swallow just as all moisture was vacuumed away from my shriveling tongue.