Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

Praise for
Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

“It's a measure of Barkley's talent that he has fashioned something so delicate from distributors, dynamite, and grief.”

—
Sunday Gazette-Mail
(Charleston, WV)

“Barkley handles the many facets of mourning and rebirth with delicacy and restraint. He has written sympathetically, not patronizingly, of a woman in transition.”

—
News& Record
(Greensboro, NC)

“A delightful, bittersweet romantic comedy that handles well on curves and can stop on a dime.”

—
Wilmington Star-News
(NC)

“A funny, poignant, and life-affirming by-the-book restoration of the soul.”

—
BookPage

“Barkley has assembled a plot that slides as smoothly as a well-oiled piston.”

—
Time Out NY

“Barkley is back and he has a winner.…Barkley steers this one straight into our hearts. Highly recommended.”

—
Library Journal
(starred)

“Quirky, emotionally resonant.…Barkley [has an understated] comic style and well-calibrated dialogue. The icing on the cake is the author's touching portrayal of small-town life in West Virginia.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Barkley's novel takes an honest look at family and community relationships his small-town characters have built and broken over the years.”

—
Southern Currents

“Barkley is a gifted writer; he knows how to blend the dark situation with comic delivery; he knows how to spin a story that holds the reader entranced. And most important of all, he knows how to take broken hearts and put them back together.”

—Jill McCorkle, author of
Creatures of Habit

“Brad Barkley's rich, humorous writing illuminates the page and makes you turn, hypnotized, to the next. He casts a gentle light upon the kinds of characters you wish you were coming home to.”

—Glen David Gold, author of Carter
Beats the Devil

Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

Brad Barkley

 

Dzanc Books

Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 2003 by Brad Barkley

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint portions of the
Haynes Automotive Repair Manual: Chevrolet Corvette, 1968 thru 1982
, Copyright © 1991 by Haynes North America, Inc.

Published 2013 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-78-2
eBook Cover Design: Steven Seighman

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.

 

For my children, Lucas and Alex

Acknowledgments

Deepest thanks to my agent, Peter Steinberg, for help and encouragement above and beyond the call. Also to my amazing editor at St. Martin's Press, Alicia Brooks—I could not have invented a better editor. I am grateful to others at St. Martin's for their generous support and faith in the book, particularly George Witte, editor in chief; John Cunningham, associate publisher; Matthew Shear, vice president and publisher; and Kevin Sweeney, production editor. Thanks also to jacket designers Steve Snider and Sarah Delson for both their talent and perseverance. I'm grateful to my friend Susan Perabo and the mysterious Anthony Tuck for casting their eyes upon early drafts, to Tina Lombardi for the crash course in dams, and to Frostburg State University and the Maryland State Arts Council for financial help. Thanks to all my friends in Maryland and West Virginia who lent me their stories and names, to friends scattered everywhere or gathered on a Thursday night, to my parents, and, finally, to Mary, for far too many reasons to list here.

 

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

-JEAN COCTEAU

 

Alison's

The garage was no more than a decaying shack, covered in torn asphalt shingles, tilting at the end of a long gravel driveway. Alison Durst squinted against the late-afternoon sun, waiting for her brother-in-law to open the garage door. Bill tried several keys, shook his head at each one, until finally the rusted lock clicked open. Alison and her sister, Sarah, helped him pull as the door slid upward, angled and creaking, dropping fragments of broken window glass. They ducked under a low-beamed ceiling hung with cracked garden hoses, a sled dangling from a nail, and strands of Christmas bulbs, into a stilled grayness, slats of light flecked with dust motes. In one corner leaned a bent snow shovel and a badminton net scrolled around its aluminum poles, and in the other a tangle of tomato stakes and twine, a wooden cutout of a reindeer, the edges worn and feathery. And at the center of all the clutter sat a junked Corvette, covered in dust, the tires mushy, silver paint peeling in strips.

“Well, you asked, so now you've seen the famous car,” Sarah said, rubbing dirt off her hands. She snapped on a lightbulb hanging from an extension cord, half an old coffee can for a lamp shade. The jarring light draped everything with shadow. The floor was nothing more than packed dirt, the air full of wet smells, the car's interior a dull maroon, stringy with cobwebs.

“Famous like what, the Hindenburg? The Titanic?” Alison said. It was about the saddest car she'd ever seen; it looked fossilized. “How much did you pay for it? Or did they pay you?”

“My nephew defaulted on the loan,” Bill said. “We'd cosigned. Fifteen hundred later, boom, there you are.” He gestured at the Corvette. Earlier that afternoon, Bill and Sarah had argued over how much money to send that same nephew for his eighteenth birthday, which was how the subject of the car came up in the first place. Until then, Alison had never heard of it, never bothered to even peek in the garage. Sarah had wanted to send a card that read, “You Now Owe Us Only $1,400. Happy Birthday!”

“Deadbeat nephew,” Sarah said, frowning at the car. “You forgot deadbeat.”

“Now, now,” Alison said. “Some of our best relatives are deadbeats.” This came out wrong; too quickly, she thought of Marty and turned away, pretending to inspect the paint.

“We sank most of our money into eight-track tapes,” Sarah said. “Want to see those, too?”

Alison looked at her sister and smirked. Sarah gave her back an identical smirk, her own dimples, like Alison's, lengthened by age into creases edging her mouth. Their father had pegged them “the twins,” though Sarah was two years older. Even now, halfway through their thirties, they both still had the same graying corkscrew hair, the same slight hips and breasts, arms so long, they would hold them awkwardly, crossing and uncrossing them, jamming their hands in their pockets.

“How does it drive?” Alison asked.

Bill shrugged. “We never actually drove it. Tow truck backed it in, and that was that.”

Alison walked around the car, stepping over a weed eater, a tangle of tire chains. “And you've had this how long?” she asked.

“A long time, too long,” Sarah said. “I keep telling Bill, let's just scrap the thing.”

“Well, I can't believe you never told Marty about it,” Alison said. “You didn't need to scrap it.” Marty would have insisted on saving the car, the way he'd saved console stereos and televisions, his VW van, the Pong video game from the bowling alley. He had rescued obsolete things the way other people rescue dogs from the pound. Things were more pitiful than people, he'd told her once, because when they got old and wore out, they didn't have guilty relatives around to pretend otherwise. The pack rat's apologist, she'd called him.

Sarah said something else about the car, but Alison only half-heard her. She was lost in thought, absently trying to list the sixty-six British monarchs, the same list she used to let her students memorize for extra credit—
Ethelwulf, Ethelbald, Alfred the Great
. She did this unconsciously, a habit she'd acquired in grad school and carried over into her teaching, her version, she thought of it, of biting fingernails or tapping pencils. It annoyed her, had annoyed Marty when they'd sit on the couch to watch a ball game, and he'd glance over and catch her squinting at the ceiling, her lips barely moving. But for these past months she'd indulged the habit, rather than hiding it away. Better this obsessive cataloging of the past than growing silent and brooding over some Jeep commercial on TV or a rack of flannel shirts at Sears. It was distraction, a noisy game. Without it, she would catch herself thinking of Marty in the present tense, as if he were only off somewhere in the woods riding dirt-bike trails or in the basement drinking coffee with Lem Kerns. Or worse, she would think of the morning of the day he died, those hours beginning their ugly echo inside her, and so she would close her eyes and start listing the monarchs, the Bill of Rights, the names of the Popes, the divisions of the Magna Carta, muttering like the old ladies in church bent over their rosaries. But she could never keep it all in her mind, couldn't recall if the third concern of the Magna Carta dealt with royal forests or towns and trades, or who succeeded Edward the Elder. The past, like the present, seemed a shifty, deceitful thing.

“Did you hear me?” Sarah said.

Alison looked at her sister.

“Ali, I'm trying to tell you,” Sarah said. “We got the car
after
Marty's accident. A few weeks after.”

“Well,” Alison said, “when you said ‘a long time,' I just thought…”

“It
has
been a long time,” Sarah said, too quickly. Bill busied himself untangling the tire chains. “Two years now,” Sarah added.

Alison looked away, her eyes adjusting to the dim light of the garage. “Thanks for the update,” she said. In the dust blanketing the hood of the car, she scrawled
WASH ME
with the tip of her finger. She could cry right then if she nudged herself over into it, or she could nudge herself the other way and smash the windshield of the car, throw things at people she loved. Heat tightened around her chest, her eyes warming. She breathed the smell of fertilizer and rust, of wet dirt, gasoline, old leather.

Sarah sighed. “Okay, listen. Six months ago, we'd've probably lied about having any car, knowing it'd make you think of Marty. Wouldn't we, Bill?”

Bill smiled and shrugged, his face pink, hair neatly parted, as if he were about to have his school picture taken. He looked at Sarah and said, “That's exactly right.” Good old Bill. Always so agreeable, so embarrassed by all of this. Alison felt grateful then that he'd gone along with her moving in, dragging the mess of her life behind her.

“So, that's probably a good sign, don't you think?” Sarah said. Alison shrugged, then nodded. How did she know if it was good or not? Maybe she should've looked it up in one of those god-awful books that friends had pressed on her in the weeks after the accident.
A Path Through Grief
was one title she remembered.
Embrace the Silence, The Passages of Living
. Like the names of the soap operas her mother used to watch at the Laundromat while she folded bath towels. The only help any of those books provided had been in giving her someone to resent for a few distracting weeks. She would open the back flaps, look at those smiling book-jacket faces, read the overview with its blueprint for grief. As if all those experts had gotten together to scout the emptiness of her first months after, to chart the topography of her loss. She read enough to figure out that they didn't know much beyond how to sell books to vulnerable people. The first night she arrived at Sarah's, she'd walked out in the dark and flung the stack of them as far as she could, one by one, into the lake.

“You know what?” Sarah said. Awkward, her words clumsy. “This two-year mark coming up, I think that will be your time, when you're, you know, back on your feet?”

The two of them stood watching her. Sarah had said the same thing at the six-month mark, the one-year mark, and again at eighteen months, and the statement had slowly bent itself into a question, just as she knew Sarah's concern had bent into impatience. And who could blame her? Two years was a long time. But Alison wasn't some widow, running around in a black dress and veil, not anymore. Somehow, though, her mourning had evolved into a kind of indolence, an inertia of stunted feeling.

Alison looked at them standing in the door of the garage, and behind them their A-frame house angled against the evening sky. It had always looked out of place, that house, without some mountains around it, a ski slope or two. But this was Wiley Ford, in West Virginia, and instead of mountains there were only ancient, low hills, ground down like the teeth of some fitful, sleeping child. The house glowed above its lawn, above the lake which belonged not to it but to the town. Soon the house would be filled with the usual crowd, the old people, dancing and dancing, flooding the living room with vibration and movement.