Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (27 page)

“How about that, Arthur? Pretty soon, you'll be dating starlets.”

He motioned for the pad and pen. Alison had to hold it for him, propping it on his stomach as he wrote with his right hand.

FAMOUS FOR TRIV OR FOR KISSING PAVEMENT??

Alison showed his scrawl to Sarah, and they both laughed.
He smiled behind the tubing, motioned to her, and wrote again.

1ST PRIEST OF CAT. CHURCH DIED FALLING FR. BELL TOWER

Alison read it over. “Here?” He nodded, and Alison showed the writing to Sarah.

“Well,” Alison said, “that's what you get for opening a cat church. Now, a
dog
church might have worked.” As usual, feeling nervous, she began making dumb jokes. Mr. Rossi motioned for the pad again.

NO LAUGH PLS … HURTS!

She patted his hand. Sarah seemed even more awkward than Alison, nervous, trying not to cry. Finally she gave up on talking and clicked the TV remote. The three of them sat for a while, watching some happy woman sell jewelry on the Home Shopping Channel. For some reason, none of the other channels worked. While they watched, she took his hand and every so often he would squeeze her fingers, as if to reassure himself she was still there. When Sarah clicked through, the other channels were working again. They settled finally on Mr. Rossi's choice, a show on PBS about chefs in Germany.

After a while, Sarah got up and said she was heading to the cafeteria. The Harmons would be there soon, to take their turn visiting. Sarah patted Mr. Rossi's foot, started to speak, but couldn't. He motioned for the pad.

HOT DOG + MILK SHAKE PLS

Sarah laughed. “Sorry, old man. All your food right now is prepared by Chez Plastic Bag. No hot dogs for you.”

He wrote again, Alison holding the pad.

DANCING IS
GOOD
. THANK U

Sarah cut her eyes at Alison, patted his foot again, and left quickly. They sat in the glow of the TV, watching a man in a toque beat eggs with a whisk. Mr. Rossi's breathing became slow and steady, though when she looked over, he was not asleep. The chef show ended, replaced by one about river otters. Mr. Rossi motioned with his good hand for the pad and pen. While he wrote, Alison studied his face. His silver hair, that usual ocean wave of pompadour, had been either shaved away or hidden by bandages, his big glasses smudgy with fingerprints, his left eyelid droopy and half-shut. He finished writing.

I'M NOT GOOD

“No, you aren't,” she said. “But you will be. Good as ever.”

SCARY

“Yeah, I know,” she said.

He went back to writing on the pad. Her arm grew sore and she switched hands, standing with her back to him. What could he be writing? She thought about Max last night, standing in her garage and asking her to “make amends.” Such an old-fashioned idea, almost antique, something God might have asked for in Deuteronomy. What exactly did he mean?

Mr. Rossi put down the marker long enough to flip the page and continue. He'd been writing for five minutes now. She had a sudden image of him writing an entire book while she stood there with cobwebs hanging over her. But then she worried, what if he is writing some kind of confession, a love letter he wanted her to deliver, a tirade directed at the family they'd been unable to find? What was she supposed to do?

He finished finally, tore the sheet off, folded it as well as he could and clumsily tucked it into her jeans pocket. When she started to take it out, he made motions for her not to. Then she understood that he wanted her to look later, after she'd left the hospital. Maybe it was a love letter to
her
.

Sarah came back and they made their good-byes to him, promising to return the next day, reminding him that the Harmons would be along later. Sarah let out a huge sigh as they moved through the sliding front doors and out into the sunlight. Alison looked around. The day looked almost too bright. Sun glinted off the windshields of the cars. Across the way, kids played in the school yard, tossing a yellow ball over a net. Everything looked baked, whitewashed. Alison kept putting her hand over the folded-up letter in her jean's pocket, but she didn't want to look just yet, not now, with Sarah here. Later would be better, alone in her room.

“Your old college should offer a course in what to say to people in hospitals,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but who would teach it?” As they walked to the car, Alison realized she'd forgotten to ask him the one thing she'd meant to: whether he'd felt sick and fallen, or just fallen by accident. He was still the only one who knew the answer, and probably he preferred it that way.

Alison changed into her grease-stained clothes and spent the afternoon under the car, trying to figure out where the scraping sound was coming from, stopping long enough to hear updates from Sarah after she'd talked to Dr. Tabor or the Harmons. She crawled underneath with her trouble light, just looking, frustrated. The whole thing seemed impossible to figure out: The sound was there only when the car was moving, and she could look for it only when the car was still. She shook everything, tightened a few rusty bolts. She banged on a few parts with the back of a wrench, and finally she gave up.

Later that night, after Sarah and Bill were asleep, she took the Vette out again. No one yet even knew that it was running, let alone that she was driving it. She felt like Mr. Rossi, hoarding her secret knowledge, though if Max had bothered to ask last night, she would have told him, taken him for a drive. It no longer worried her that the car had no tags or registration; somehow, at 2:00
A.M
. in West Virginia, it felt as if the law didn't really apply The road she'd found on the opposite side of the lake into town was long and straight, with only that soft rise toward the end, and she drove it up and back, turning around in the town square to drive it again. Once, before she ran out of road, the speedometer needle tipped up toward 100 and she felt her heart flipping wildly behind her ribs, felt her breathing resume when she slowed. She loved the car, but worried about it, too. Probably just her imagination, but on curves, the car felt loose somehow, as though it might twist free of itself. Mr. Beachy told her in the store once that rust could get so bad that cars had broken in two when their owners tried to jack them up. She thought about the interior, too. It would look pretty shabby once the outside had new paint. One of her catalogs advertised kits that let you replace the entire interior—the seat covers, carpet, door panels, and dash—make it all new, even change its color if you wanted. But the kits were expensive, and she had no clue how to install any of the stuff. On top of that, she'd have to farm out all the bodywork, or else learn to weld, and she had no intention of ever getting anywhere near a welder. She would be here years, not months, trying to finish the car, in way over her head. The idea filled her with dread, as did the idea of teaching again, of moving back to her museum house. But neither did she want to linger on—now that she'd driven the car, she wanted it finished, behind her.

Flushed and windblown, she eased quietly down the driveway and backed into the garage. It was near three o'clock in the morning. One of the headlight doors got stuck in the up position when she clicked the switch off, refusing to glide back down into the nose of the car. Tired as she was, she slid under the bumper for the second time that day and clicked on her trouble light. Nothing looked wrong. She jiggled the wires a few times, disconnected and then reconnected the vacuum hose. It was the side with the good beams, so she just left it. She could fix it later. The silence she noticed in her garage so late was the missing voices of the men who used to fish the lake, their laughs and shouts. They'd gone home now, given up. When she closed her eyes, she could still hear the echo of them, of all the life carried in those voices. She clicked off the trouble light, and when her eyes closed this time, they stayed closed, and she felt herself falling into those imagined voices, sinking into sleep.

She awoke to the slam of the storm door, awoke stiff and sore, damp and chilled, her hand still curled around the trouble light. Outside, in ashen light, the moon still up, she found Bill, his tool belt strapped around his waist, standing in the front yard just looking around, drinking coffee.

She smiled walking up to him, shivering a little. “So what's the plan now, throw coffee on the house?”

He seemed a little startled, even though he'd just watched her walk up. “Nah. The plan is go to work.”

“Work?” She just then noticed his gray phone company shirt, the pocket protector full of small tools. “What about—”

“Time's up. Game is over and I lose.” He blinked quickly and drank from his cup.

“Bill…it wasn't like it was a competition. You didn't
lose
.”

“I
did
lose. Can you get it all done, can you make a life before time runs out? That's the game. Have everything in place before it all starts to quit or die or get old.”

Or
rust
, she thought. “Bill, you have a life. A nice home. Sarah loves you.”

He nodded, tight-lipped. “All true.”

“You did everything you could. I'm sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” He pitched the rest of his coffee into the grass, got into his truck, and drove away.

The day brought little change in Mr. Rossi. Alison visited in late morning, talking to “the child,” Sarah's name for Dr. Tabor, which everyone else had begun using. He didn't help himself much, either, wearing the Snoopy scrubs, a Three Stooges tie. He told them there was swelling in Mr. Rossi's brain, that they planned another MRI for the afternoon. He was sleeping, almost in a light coma. Most of Seven Springs Village had gone into full emergency mode, reserved for sicknesses and deaths—which meant, for the most part, the preparing of food. Pies, cakes, and casseroles, having no other place to go, ended up at Sarah's house. The only person Alison hadn't seen since all of this started was Mr. Kesler. Maybe Max was right about him; maybe he was off pouting because the accident had stolen the attention away from his car story. Hard to believe that anyone could be that petty. She didn't want to believe it. The decorations for Founders' Day had been taken down from the storefronts and telephone poles, and the town looked stripped somehow, exposed and embarrassed about what had happened. The sign for
DISCOUNT
was out completely while workers stood on ladders trying to repair it, and enough autumn air had settled in now that the big windows of the Red Bird were filmy with moisture dripping down. At home, she and Sarah sat at the kitchen table and ate leftover casserole heated in the microwave.

“I saw Bill off to work this morning,” Alison said.

Sarah nodded. “Good, because I didn't. I slept in. This hospital crap wears me out.”

“He was upset.”

“We had a deal, Ali. Time was up. Besides, food all over the house? Fire? I didn't sign up to be married to the village witch doctor.”

Alison stood and began clearing dishes. “I know. I just feel bad for him.”

Sarah still sat, staring at the spot where her plate had been, and then she began crying, her face unchanged, tears dotting the place mat. “For maybe a day and a half, I believed him. I mean, I had
faith
, you know? This is gonna work, for whatever crazy reason.” She shook her head. “So, I was wrong, Bill's back at work, and faith is bullshit. I just don't want my hopes lifted up anymore. I want them left alone.” Alison rubbed her sister's shoulders for a moment, then finished the dishes and left the kitchen. There was nothing to say, beyond the kind of pep talk she'd given Bill, and that would never fly with Sarah.

That night, the three of them sat in the living room watching the local news on TV, Bill with his company shirt untucked and boots unlaced, tilted back in the recliner, Sarah doing her usual trick of reading a magazine and watching TV at the same time, and Alison half-watching, thinking about Mr. Rossi, Max, her car, about the order of the British monarchs, Mr. Kesler, and Bill's failed magic—thinking all of it and none of it, vaguely aware of the man on the TV screen, who was saying something about gun control and violence in our schools. Fall was settling on West Virginia, and Sarah kept the front and back doors open in the evenings, a passageway for the outside smells of cool air, the last grass cuttings of the year, the creosote from the exposed lake bed. Earlier, Sarah said, some people from Maryland had parked at the edge of her drive and walked down to take pictures of Colaville, the tilted buildings and broken-backed stone bridge. Finally—dried, emptied, and seventy years too late—the lake had attracted its promise of tourists.

An infomercial for some kind of outdoor grill came on, some has-been celebrity nearly orgasmic in his excitement over the invention. Sarah and Bill headed silently up to bed, and Alison sat watching the screen. When she was a kid and turned off the TV in the dark after her parents headed to bed, there would still be that little blue dot in the middle of the screen, and she would sit watching it. The show after the show, she thought of it. The show all shrunk down and reduced to the size of molecules, all the actors and their sitcom problems squeezed down to a little pea of light.