Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (15 page)

“Look at all this stuff,” she said, waving at the latest pile of parts she'd bought from Mr. Beachy, all of them boxed or shrink-wrapped.

“Hey, pretty nice job on the wheels,” he said, bending.

“Do you have any idea what they mean by ‘bleed the brakes'?”

“They who?”

She pointed at the manual on the workbench. “The book guys.”

He nodded. “I know what the book guys mean. It's a two-person job.”

She pointed at him and then herself. “One, two. Let's get to work.”

“Tonight? It's nearly midnight.”

“Now you're Cinderella? So what?”

“Besides, you can't bleed the brakes until you finish all the wheels, and it wouldn't hurt to replace the parking-brake cable while you're at it.”

Now she remembered—one of the lab-coat guys had suggested exactly the same thing. “Let's do something, then. Let's work on the brake lines.”

“Listen, tomorrow we'll get whatever else parts you need and spend the whole day on the car, I promise. I still think you're throwing good money after bad.”

“How long did you say those cows and chickens lived again?” She smiled.

“Okay, okay. It's your Visa bill, not mine.”

Actually, he was right to be worried about her Visa bill, without even knowing it. She had not collected a paycheck in nearly two years now, living off the modest life-insurance payment and the tiny bit of money they'd saved. Since the start, she'd bought groceries for Sarah (the only way Sarah would let her contribute anything), but the last two times, she'd had to put them on her credit card. Now she was buying car parts, expensive parts for an expensive car, with no way of paying for them. Maybe Mr. Beachy would hire her and give her an employee discount, or, better yet, pay her in parts. Selling the car once it was all done seemed pointless, like those game-show contestants who sell their new boats to pay for the taxes on them. Anyway, if Max was right about the rust, the car wouldn't be worth half of what she'd put into it. So now she'd put herself into the same kind of predicament that she'd always bitched at Marty about—throwing away money on some big plan, on the next perpetual-motion machine. In the morning she would be back at Mr. Beachy's, running up her bill again, her own impossible project taking on the kind of meaning that Marty's must have held for him. The dead indict us, over and over, guilt by association.

She was distracted by the noise of the men who fished the lake and turned to look out at the circle of them gathered at the lake's center. The laughing rose up hollow, almost wooden-sounding. Already they had occupied the two small stone buildings left exposed along the bottom, the square windows filled with yellow lamplight. They moved in and out of the buildings, faint shadows of men.

“Looks like they've settled in,” Max said. He stood behind her, close enough that she felt the aura of heat that surrounded him. She let herself float into that heat, leaning back into him until her shoulders were against his chest. Then she leaned forward and back again, bumping him. Then again, as if it were only a game, only playground flirting, instead of what it really felt like at the warm center of her chest: a need for touch that rivaled, just then, her need for air.

“I don't want to jinx it,” Max said, “but I might have a job coming up in Morgantown soon. A big job. If it materializes, I want you to come with me.”

“What are you dynamiting this time?”

“Something big. Puts grain silos to shame.”

“A whale?”

“Bigger.”

She bumped him again, and he put his hands on her shoulders and held her there, keeping her against him. His chin rested atop her head.

“Are all our dates going to involve blowing something up?” she asked him. “Not that I'm complaining.” She settled back, leaning against him fully.

“Are we dating?”

“Aren't we?”

“Then will you go with me? We'll have to be there a few days. You can be my good luck.”

“Gee, you sure know how to make a girl feel like a rabbit's foot. When did you get so superstitious?”

He slipped his arms down around her, pressing her arms to her sides. She loved to be held that way, all wrapped up. She'd forgotten how much. “If you're working with dynamite,” he said, “superstition kind of goes with the job.”

“You told me it was safe as a box of pencils.”

“Yeah, well,
exploding
pencils. I left that part out.” She felt his chin moving as he spoke, the vibration of his throat against the back of her neck.

“You're as bad as your father.”

He was quiet a minute, then let out a long sigh, his breath stirring her hair. “I'm not like my father in any way, Alison, okay?”

Her face heated up. “Fine, I'm sorry. But for the record, I happen to like your father.”

“That makes one of us.”

“You know, Max, you make it sound like he was some crackhead who used to beat you with a board, instead of this harmless guy who likes to tell stories.”

“And make a career out of bullshitting his son. And tell enough lies to drive his wife away. He's done damage.”

“Who hasn't?” She found herself widening her eyes to prevent tears from forming. Max nodded in answer, making her own head nod with his. She turned inside his arms and faced him, leaning back a little to look up at him. He was shorter than Marty, his shoulders wider. He had a different smell, different angles to his body. He tightened his grip and bent to kiss her, her heart stretching out like drum skin across her chest, the fronts of their thighs touching and trading warmth, and at the last second she turned her head, so that his kiss landed clumsily at the corner of her mouth, a moist smear, the lens of his glasses tipped by her cheek. They were quiet a few moments, his forehead resting against her temple.

“It's been a while for me, too,” he said. “But I don't think my aim has gotten that bad.”

She nodded. “No, that was me. I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry and what?” He let her go and leaned against the Corvette's fender. “You want me to leave again? So you can call me back here tomorrow?”

She looked at him, thinking of the way she'd imagined Marty in the basement of their house, a ghost-man rebuilding some old radio, willing it to work, the footsteps of his wife above him falling like hammer blows of accusation, the hard rhythm of all they had missed, all the ways he'd failed her. And now there remained only the rhythm of absence, the quiet tick of months and years passing, some wordless song about time running out. Grass grew under her feet like a million tiny hammers, landing their own blows. Marty was dust now, long in the ground and gone, the wisp of smoke from that soldering iron curling itself into outer space. Max shifted his weight on the Corvette, and something inside it clanked, some part that she would have to fix in a week or two or ten. We restore our radios, our cars, our dams, and all the while our bodies keep failing us, refusing to restore themselves except in the trick of sex, or childbirth, or some sad weight-loss plan. Or a kiss.

“No, don't leave,” she said. “Sorry I flinched.”

He looked at her, thinking. “You know, the real Cinderella got her kiss, eventually,” he said. “And I was promised.”

“First off, it wasn't a promise, more like a statistical probability, and second, I can't believe you're really going to use that Cinderella thing.”

He shrugged. “Hey, whatever works.”

“Typical man,” she said, “pretending to be a fairy-tale princess just to get to first base. I don't suppose you know the origin of the Cinderella story?”

He looked at the ceiling, squinting. “Not offhand.”

“It's Chinese…eighth century, maybe? Ninth?”

“Don't ask me. Those two always run together in my mind.”

“Hush, and you'll learn something.” She thought a minute, pulling together the details of the story. “The girl in the Chinese version is named Yeh-shen.” Alison drew nearer to Max, slipped her arms around him, and kissed the whiskered skin along his jaw. “The fairy godmother appears as an enormous fish with golden eyes, swimming at the edge of a pond. Yeh-shen's evil stepmother kills the fish, but the bones are magic and continue to live in the water.” Her voice dropped down to a whisper, punctuated by tiny kisses that traced the boundaries of his face. He held still, listening, she thought, or not wanting to scare her away. Skittish, he must think of her, or just odd. “Yeh-shen visits the bones every day, talking to them, but mourning them, too, that they are no longer her beautiful golden fish.” She kissed his mouth then, his lips dry a moment until he drew them in to moisten them, her hands moving up to hold his face, her lips moving against his again, their tongues briefly touching. She tasted on him the cigarettes he'd smoked earlier, the taste like the smell of a campfire caught in clothing. “Yeh-shen wanted to go to the spring festival,” she whispered, her mouth beside his, “but had nothing to wear until the magic bones gave her a gown, azure, with a cloak of kingfisher feathers sewn with silver thread.” She kissed him harder and his mouth softened, their bodies touching where her hipbones knifed against the flat planes of his body, holding him like hands, triangulated by his own hardness jutting between them. She pressed against him, his arms drawing her in, his hands delineating her skinny curves, the arch at the small of her back, the cant of her rib cage—places on her body she hadn't given any thought to for a long time.

When she drew her mouth away to whisper again, she felt the small thread of saliva that anchored their mouths an inch apart, imagined it as silver under the lightbulb, as if illustrating the story of the azure dress, and as she thought that, she felt herself slipping out of the moment, pulling back from it as though she were watching not only that fragile wet thread but the two of them under the light, her awkward hands on his face, her angled hips, and as soon as she saw them that way, she was not thinking of the kiss or of being in the near dark with a man again, finally, but of the fairy tale. Of all fairy tales, and how they tell lies about happily ever after and the presence of magic in the world. Instead, how about one that explains that life is a spoiled five-year-old, an Indian giver that, in the end, wants itself back? A few nights before, Tyra Wallace had shown up for the dance partnered, Alison couldn't help but think, with the chrome-and-green oxygen tank she drew behind her on a small stainless dolly. She spent the evening sitting and watching, drawing ragged breaths through the filmy plastic mask. Somehow—either slowly or all at once—life slipped in its thin needle and sucked away its own essence, a lunatic mosquito, feeding on itself. And if you avoided the kinds of accidents that had taken Marty away, then you ended up like Tyra Wallace, the body doing itself in, and you with it. A double-crosser, planning an inside job all along.

Just as she felt Max pull back from her, just as he began to ask her what was wrong, a flash of orange lit up the walls of the garage, and she turned in time to see a fireball curl upward and disappear in the dark air above the lake. The noise of the men grew more excited, louder, and then settled back into quiet.

“Cousin of yours?” Alison said, her voice unsteady.

Max smiled but seemed worried as well, moving to the window and cupping his hands to look out. He told her he didn't really like the idea of anything exploding when it wasn't supposed to. He insisted on walking down to make sure that everything was okay, that no one was hurt. Alison shrugged. Men were always like this, wanting to mother the whole world of strangers, then acting like strangers themselves. She clicked off the light and followed him out.

Some of the other people who lived in the houses around the lake stood on their front porches, clutching bathrobes to themselves, trying to see what all the commotion was about. She and Max stepped down into the cracked mud along the bank, Max holding her hand, their feet oozing into soft spots. She'd thought enough to bring her new flashlight, the one Mr. Beachy had sold her, and fanned its light out as they walked, picking up broken bottles, pull tabs, muddied scraps of paper. All of them seemed like souvenirs of the night, insistent little reminders that she had just kissed a man for the first time in two years, had her tongue inside his wet mouth. And the first man other than Marty in more than ten years. She tried to convince herself of that old Humphrey Bogart song—what was the line, a kiss was just a kiss? Still a kiss?

Alison looked back toward the house, where the rows of pomegranates made blotchy shadows in the dark. Bill had given up for the night and disappeared inside. Just then a pair of headlights swung into the gravel drive, and the Seven Springs van lurched to a halt, then sat idling, dust spinning in the air around it. “What the hell?” Alison said. For a few seconds her mind did a little time jog, thinking it was early evening and time for the dancers to arrive. She looked at Max and he shrugged, and both of them walked back out of the lake.

Mr. Kesler sat behind the wheel, looking at the dark house, slowly turning his attention to the two of them as they approached the van.

“Dad?” Max said. “What's going on?”

“Gordon, is something wrong?” Alison asked. He sat in his powder blue jumpsuit, both hands in his lap.

“I must have the wrong night,” he said. He looked at his watch and shook his wrist, then looked at the house a few more times.

“Dad, it's after midnight. What are you
doing
out here?”

“I…” He opened his mouth, closed it. “I think this watch is faulty. Cheaply made and all that.” He looked stung by his own confusion, his eyes old and a little panicked behind his scientist glasses.

Alison and Max quickly looked at each other. Alison thought, but didn't bother pointing out, that if this
had
been the right time, he'd brought the van and no riders.