Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (26 page)

The doctor gave a half shrug. “Hard to say. We're draining fluid; then we'll see where we are, cognitively speaking. Questions?”

“Can we see him?” Alison asked.

“Soon enough. Anything else?” He started patting his pockets then, searching for something. Not finding it, he gave up, turned, and disappeared through the stainless-steel doors.

“I
wish
we could get a doctor that's maybe older than fifteen,” Sarah said. “Did you see the little Snoopys all over his scrubs? What are those, his pajamas?”

“He's fine,” Bill said. “He seems to know his stuff.” For all his belief in the mystical, Bill had always seemed to have an equal faith in doctors.

“Mr. Rossi will love this, when I tell him about it,” Alison said.

Sarah looked at her. “Love what?”

“All that business about whether he fell first or got sick first or did the sickness make him fall, and no one knows. Don't you see?” The two of them stared at her. She opened her hands before her, as if revealing the obvious. “He's a trivia question now. Only he knows the answer. It's perfect.”

“Bill,” Sarah said, “please take her home and get her some sleep.”

She did sleep, fitfully, through the night, and awoke to the slant of light that used to bring the flashes of lake to her walls, but now only fell flat in a dense, pale spill. Downstairs she found most of the dancers sitting in the living room, drinking coffee and eating the Oreos that Bill had put out. They looked like nervous children, their mouths dusted black with crumbs. Mrs. Skidmore was smoking, telling a story from thirty years ago about a diving donkey at the county fair and how he'd been rescued by local animal-rights people.

“Hippie types, you know,” Mrs. Skidmore said, and drank her beer. Alison thought of Max and his Natural Causes Ranch. “Good people, though,” she said.

“Can somebody tell me what the latest is?” Alison asked. They turned as a group to look at her.

“They put that donkey out on Charlie Magusson's old farm, out where Taco Bell is now,” Mrs. Skidmore said, annoyed to have her story interrupted.

Bill stepped over beside Alison. “Sarah and Lila are at the hospital,” he said, whispering.

“And?”

“But the donkey knew just one thing in this life, and couldn't be happy unless he got to dive,” Mrs. Skidmore said, smoke coming out with her words. “Brayed day and night.”

“No real change,” Bill said. “He's in and out. They drained the bleeding.”

Alison winced. Over and over she saw his slow fall off the truck, his head, the pavement.

“Charlie built him a ramp, all the way up to the barn loft,” Mrs. Skidmore continued. “And down below he bought a backyard pool and filled it up. I can still remember that thing. Had sea horses painted all over it. Anyway, that donkey—name was Einstein, they said—would dive all day, like he worked on some assembly line.”

“Sarah is all torn up over this,” Bill said. “She thinks it's her fault.”

“Well, it's easy to feel that way,” Alison told him. “She'll get past it. And he'll be fine.”

“Charlie got to the point where he couldn't do nothing all day but stand out there with a hose and refill the pool. And that winter, he had to heat water for it in buckets, and haul it out from the house. His whole
job
became Einstein the Wonder Donkey.”

“He should have charged some type of admission,” Mr. Harmon said.

“He tried that, made a few dollars, and that's when the animal-rights types jumped all over him. Okay for Einstein to dive as a hobby, I guess. Just don't put him to work. Plus, you could stand at the fence and watch for free anyway. People got sick of it. Clomp, clomp, splash. Clomp, clomp, splash. All damn day.”

Though Alison was only half-listening to the story, Bill was drawn into it, missing the last thing Alison said to him, edging over toward Mrs. Skidmore. In his way, Bill had lots in common with Einstein the Wonder Donkey—perseverance, if nothing else.

“So what happened?” Bill asked.

“Eventually, Charlie, good-hearted as he was, got sick of it, too. Einstein would not stop for anything, except to rest a few hours at night.” Mrs. Skidmore finished her beer and rattled the pull-top tab inside the can. “Finally, one Saturday night, Charlie just drained all the water from the pool, left it standing there, and that Sunday morning was the end of it. Clomp, clomp, thud, and that was all she wrote.”

Mr. Rossi leaned back against the pillows, a tube taped to his mouth, his face bruised yellow and purple. The thing that always struck Alison were the little bits of normalcy that clung to people when they became patients—Mr. Rossi's glasses perched on his face and taped to the bandages on his head, the turquoise ring he always wore, still on his finger. Reminders of the ordinariness they'd swerved away from to be here. When she sat at the end of his bed, he didn't stir much, just moaned a little in his sleep, the machines doing their beeping, hissing work beside him. He was in a private room, his window overlooking strip-mining equipment up the side of a hill, the windowsill adorned with flowers sent by the dance group. As far as anyone had been able to determine, he had no family. Sarah had made calls anywhere she could think of, and Bill had called a few people he knew at the Shriner's club. Dead ends, over and over. No one, it seemed, belonged to him. She sat for a while, watching him sleep.

Later that night, while she was underneath the Vette looking for holes in the exhaust, she heard Max knocking at the door frame, calling her name. She slid out from under the car, the taste of rust in her mouth.

“I guess you heard,” she said.

He nodded. “My father told me. And I'm sorry. The city engineers came by, worried I'm about to drop my hotel in the middle of the street.”

“Your father. I haven't seen him since it happened.” She stood up, dusted off her jeans. Max gave her a quick hug and a kiss.

“The whole thing is competition for everyone's attention.” He shrugged. “So he's pissed. He's not page one anymore.”

She looked at him. “He told you that?”

“He doesn't have to. It's just reasonable. I know his MO.”

Alison snapped off her trouble light and closed the hood. “Maybe he's upset about all of this.”

Max snorted. “Maybe he's going to sprout wings and ascend to heaven, too.” His face looked pinched, sour.

“You know, he was in that truck when it happened, playing the music. And he and Mr. Rossi are friends. I see them talking at the dances.”

“Friends?” He couldn't have looked more surprised if she'd told him they were lovers.

“Yes, of a sort. Sinkholes, I think, was the topic of conversation.” It was the only one she could remember, and “friends” actually was a stretch, but maybe Mr. Kesler was the closest Mr. Rossi had to one, besides her.

“Sinkholes and how cars disappear into them, no doubt.”

She shook her head. “Again with the car. You know, you
really
ought to let go of it. The story is older than you are.”

“It's not the car, I told you that.” He flipped through her Haynes manual, then closed it and looked at her, eyes obscured by his glasses.

“If it's not the car, then you can drop the whole thing, right? Forget about it? Smile when he mentions it?”

“Yeah, of course.
You
helped him. You're complicit in all of this now, so sure, let's drop the whole thing. Let the liars lie, right?”

Her face warmed. “What are you, a Boy Scout? You never told one lie in your life? Never did one dishonest thing? Your father tells these bullshit stories, and no one but you cares. Get over it.”

Max swiped his arm and smacked the shop manual, scattering it and a few box wrenches into the dirt. “You don't know what it's
like
, Alison.” He raised his hands, as if surrendering the idea of hitting anything else.

She took a step back from him. “No, I don't. So tell me what it's like.”

Max picked the manual up, dusted the cover along the thigh of his jeans, and put it back on the bench. He sighed. “We used to have this workshop out in the backyard that Dad used as his office. Just a desk, typewriter, a radio. That was it. Almost every night, as soon as it was dark, he would tell my mother he had to work in the office, hang around in there for twenty minutes, and then just take off. Be gone half the night. His car was always parked down the block, and he'd leave a light and the radio on in the office. He'd wear this goddamn aftershave when he left, slick his hair down with water.”

Alison sat on the hood of the Corvette. “She must have known.”

“She would ask me, and my job was to back him up. To corroborate.” Max picked up the box wrenches and arranged them on the bench. “I'd tell her I just saw him standing by the window, or that he was really busy with work, whatever. I couldn't even look at her. He paid me five bucks every week. My only chore.”

Alison shook her head. “And she never went out to
check?”

Max frowned. “My mother was deathly afraid of snakes. I mean, this almost mythic, biblical fear, you know? So of course he told her the backyard was overrun with copperhead nests. Told her they'd come out at night and fill the yard. I told her the same thing. She would send me out sometimes if she had to ask him something, and I would make this big show of putting on my work boots. Then I'd make up an answer to whatever question she had. Sometimes, after I'd gone to bed, I would hear her leaning out the back door, calling his name over and over, calling out to that stupid empty office.”

For a second, she imagined him lying in bed and hearing that, feeling the way she'd felt those nights in her own room, staring at the ceiling. “You said he drove her away.”

“One Fourth of July—I was thirteen—I just had enough. She wanted him to come inside and watch fireworks on TV with her, and I thought, God, he can't even do
that
. I ran out into the yard in bare feet, and she was shouting about the snakes, and I pushed open the door of the office and told her all of it, yelling across the yard that he wasn't there, that he was never there. She waited up for him that night, sitting on the porch crying, while up and down the block kids kept lighting sparklers and firecrackers. Two days later, she moved back with her mother. That was that.”

“And he blamed you.”

“Of course. Nothing has been his fault in sixty-eight years. Not one thing.”

Alison watched him light another cigarette, his fingers unsteady. “So what happened after all of that?”

Max shrugged and blew smoke from the side of his mouth. “I lived with him and he kept up his bullshit. In fact, it got worse after that. He told people she'd thrown him over for someone else. Made everyone feel sorry for him. Told me I had to live with him because she didn't want me. My mother never got over it. She lived eighteen more years, and she just never did.”

“I'm sorry. I am.” Alison hesitated. “I don't think you've gotten over it, either. And you have to, at some point. You just do.” She could remember Sarah saying almost those exact words a year ago.

“No, you don't have to,” Max said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt, the cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth. “Why should she? Why should I? Someone ruins your life, you just forgive that, just drop it?”

“Because…” She shook her head. “You told me I don't know what it's like. That's the wrong verb, Max. I don't know what it
was
like. Was.”

He drew hard on his cigarette. “No. Something is over because it happened yesterday? I don't think so.”

Alison's stomach tightened and she fought to keep her voice calm. “Right now, there is a man, a friend of mine, in the hospital with blood seeping into his brain, but you're upset because your father told you lies twenty years ago. The past is the past, Max.”

“No, you lied to me. The same lie. The very same one, and you just picked up an end of it and carried it along. And you are not the past. You're right now, you're today.”

She had no answer for him. “I don't want to do this. Not now.” She crossed her arms, hugging herself. She wanted to get in the car and drive, take it up to ninety, the way she had the night before, take it even higher, as high as the speedometer went.

He rubbed his mouth. “Me either. I don't. I think we have something here, you and me. I mean, don't we?”

She nodded.

“But I can't
stand
it if you lie to me,” he said.
“Anything
else but that. You have to understand that.” His face twisted with worry, his eyes moving over her face, then moving away.

“I do understand,” she said.

He put out his cigarette. “All I'm asking is that you make amends.”

The word stopped her. It sounded like another word from
Reader's Digest
, one that no one really used anymore. “Amends,” she said. “I'm
dating
you, Max. I didn't join AA.”

He looked at her.

“Okay,” she said. “I'll make amends. But can I tomorrow? Right now I'm so tired, I ache.”

He nodded and stepped over to her. He slid his arms around her, and she let him. “I'm sorry about your friend,” he whispered. “He'll be fine. I promise.”

The next day Mr. Rossi was awake, his eyes rimmed purple, the tube taped to his mouth. Paralysis had claimed his left side, the doctor explained—for how long, no one knew. Sarah and Alison sat in chairs on opposite sides of him, the flowers from the dancers now joined by some from his Baltimore trivia contest group. None still from family, and finally they had realized the inevitable: He had no family. On his side table sat a pad and marker he used to communicate, along with the wadded-up sheets of past conversations with nurses or visitors. Frieda Landry had mentioned his accident in her “Out-n-About” column that morning, mentioning his trivia prizes and calling him “a local celebrity.” When Alison read the column aloud to him, he gave them both a slow thumbs-up.