Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (28 page)

She went out to the garage, got in the Vette, and drove off, going out to the lake road, then onto other roads she'd never been down before, into little towns much like Wiley Ford, a handful of churches and bars, a VFW hall and fire hall, a liquor store. Dried fields of corn divided one town from another, or junkyards piled with dead cars, or long, low industrial complexes. She passed a business called the Lift King, then one called Jenny's Machine Tools, houses and pole barns and trailers all mixed in together, laced with gravel roads and barbed-wire fences. A pile of leaves smoldered in the dark, someone's controlled burn from earlier in the day, a glowing red eye in the middle of the yard. The Vette's open top drew in the smell of the burning, and other smells, of skunk and cold air and Chinese food cooking. Around tight corners the car produced a new sound, the scrape of metal on metal from somewhere under the front right wheel well. She'd brought one of Bill's old WVU sweatshirts with her, and she steered with her knees long enough to pull it on against the chill. She loved these late-night drives, and it made her sad to think of winter coming on, when the roads might be too slick with snow or ice to drive them. But by then, the car would be done, all sleek and black. Black for sure, she decided just then, to blend it in with the night and the asphalt, to make it part of them. She would have the car registered and tagged and insured, everything legal, but somehow that made her sad, too, like the coming of winter. Part of what she loved about these nighttime drives was that no one knew she took them;
no
one, not even the cops, not even her sister. It was as if she went out of existence for a few hours, as if she'd been abducted. Only she was abducting herself, taking herself away, accountable only to Alison.

The gas gauge swept over toward E, and so she turned the Vette around and headed back. The house was dark, and the missing noise of the bulldozers pushing the new dam into place was noticeable at night by its absence. Already, Bill had told her, the dam was just about done, an earth dam a simple thing, really—just stones and logs pushed up together, around a core of clay, the way a kid would make a dam. With the dam complete, the lake would start filling again, the town reburied, possibly for the last time. She imagined all the ghosts of Colaville resigned to it, watching the progression through broken windows, grateful for their weeks in the open air.

When she got up to the front door, she was startled to see someone sitting on the front steps, not Bill this time, but Sarah, her cigarette a glowing button in the shadows. Alison felt suddenly busted, a sixteen-year-old sneaking in the house.

“Hey, you scared me. I was just taking the car down the road to check something—”

“The child called,” Sarah said, her voice flattened at the edges. “Mr. Rossi died while we were in there watching the fucking infomercial.” She drank from the wineglass perched beside her.

Alison stood there, the words washing over her, finding their way in through tiny paths of understanding. The orange button moved to Sarah's mouth, then away again. “How?” was all Alison could manage.

“Seizure, another stroke, they think, if the first one was a stroke to begin with. Basically, his brain died, is how the child explained it.”

A ragged, breathy noise escaped Alison's mouth, the minutes before, the rush of the car along the road, tugging at her, at
now
, wanting to pull her back in time, into their dark comfort. Her hands shook as she dragged them through her hair, as one fluttered down like a windblown scrap to settle on Sarah's head. “God,” Alison said, a prayer, an accusation. So sweet, Mr. Rossi was, the sweetest man she'd ever known, and for half a second the thought angered her, as though his sweetness had been what killed him.

“We've got to go down there in the morning,” Sarah said. “Somebody has to sign all their crap. Looks like the job falls to us.”

Alison nodded. “Where's Bill?”

“Upstairs, sleeping. I let him sleep. He takes bad news so hard, I just … No reason to tell him until morning.”

Alison nodded again. “It wasn't your fault, Sarah.”

She looked up, ground out her cigarette against the sole of her shoe. “I remember about a year's worth of time when I had to tell
you
that, and you weren't even there when Marty got killed.”

“Maybe that's
why
I thought it was my fault.”

“You wanted to save him so you could keep saving him, right? Clean him up, teach him a thing or two?”

“In a way, yeah.”

Sarah lit another cigarette, the lighter bringing her face into sharp relief, then allowing it back into the dark. She drank. “You and Bill are two of a kind. Only different. He's going to save me and the whole world.”

“And the difference?”

“He thinks alien priestesses are going to land UFOs here and rescue everyone. He's just speeding the process along.”

“And me?”

“You're the alien priestess.”

Alison nearly smiled. “Well, I envy Bill. It'd be nice to believe that. But I'm not trying to save anybody anymore.”

“Good, because you can't. You can't save a soul. Hey, I oughta tell Mr. Beachy that, he needs to know.”

Alison nodded, not knowing what to say.

Sarah looked up at her. “You're supposed to be arguing with me. Bill is going to tell me twenty-five times in the morning that this was for the best.”

“Well, no arguments from me. I agree with you. You can't save anyone. Not even yourself.” Her eyes felt hot and full.

“Hey, Ali”—she was slurring her words—“that's not what I meant.”

“Too bad, because you would've been so right. Look at me. Exhibit A on how not to save yourself.”

“Please stop.”

“I couldn't save Marty, couldn't even clean him up. Couldn't save Mr. Rossi and can't save me. I had thought to start with a car, you know. Tackle inanimate objects and work my way up.”

“The car, the car.” She poured her wine out in the grass, the way Bill had with his coffee when the day began. “You are saving the car, Alison.”

“The car is a piece of shit. It's falling apart. I've already put more into it than it's worth.” They were Max's words, more or less, but true enough. The whole thing was folly. She worked the shark's tooth back and forth on its chain, then squeezed it, letting it cut into her palm. Sarah was crying now in her silent way. Alison turned and headed toward her garage, blood throbbing in her temples. She sat in the car in the dark, looking out through the garage door into the tunnel of paler light, out at the corner of the dried lake she could see from this angle. Soon the lake would fill again, the docks floating instead of limp against the banks, the light reflecting into her window. Mr. Rossi wouldn't be here to see it. She remembered with Marty, and even with her grandmother before that, the way time divides itself into before and after whatever terrible thing has happened. And it would keep dividing, would divide again, twice, when her parents died, again and again with whoever died after that—Max, or Sarah, or Lila, or Bill, or God knows who. Time just kept halving and halving and halving, like Zeno's Paradox, the arrow that never reaches its target. We are shot through time, aiming toward—what? Death? Understanding? That must be it, because we reach death all too soon, but understanding keeps falling, always, away and away. She turned the idea over in her mind, but it was only that, an idea, a floating scrap in the slow wash of grief. She laced her hands through the spokes of the steering wheel, cried quietly for Mr. Rossi, and slept.

In the full light of morning, she put on her one girl dress, had coffee with Sarah and Bill (who, as predicted, kept saying that Mr. Rossi's “passing” was for the best), and headed over into Ridgely to make arrangements with Tucker Funeral Home. The director, Vernon Tucker, greeted them in the parking lot, as though he'd been waiting there. He wore a too-short pale gray suit and a thickly knotted, oily-looking tie that reached only to about the middle of his belly. He was friendly enough, though, donning the narrow glasses he wore on a cord around his neck to read their names and Mr. Rossi's name off a page in his notebook, taking care with pronunciation, his jacket puckered around his elbows. He drew them into his office, offered them a green vinyl couch as he sat behind his desk.

“Now, according to this, the deceased has no family per se, so you have been appointed to oversee the disposition. Am I correct in that?” He looked at them over his glasses. The shelf behind him held the photographs of all the peewee football teams he'd sponsored.

“Is that legal?” Sarah asked.

“Yes, that's correct,” Alison said. Typical Sarah, looking for a loophole.

“Yes, ma'am,” Vernon Tucker said, “the deceased did a pre-arrangement with us back in 1985, and recently amended it to add your names as executors.”

“Would you mind calling him ‘Mr. Rossi' instead of ‘the deceased'?” Alison said. Something about the word made him sound like some species, as though death imparted only a generic title.

“Nineteen eighty-five?” Sarah said. “Talk about planning ahead.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Vernon shuffled his notes. “You can take advantage of the calendar and lock in your arrangements at today's prices, then sit back and laugh at inflation.”

“I'm not sure inflation will be my first worry when I'm dead,” Alison said. The whole place was starting to give her the creeps, not for its aura of death, but for its aura of used-car lot.

Mr. Tucker gave a gentle, practiced laugh. “Now then, the de—Mr. Rossi arranged for a cremation, no funeral service per se. He was a man of austere tastes.”

“Did you know he was a champion trivia player?” Alison said. “He used to win tournaments all the time.”

“How much is all this costing?” Sarah said.

“The prearrangement takes care of all costs,” Mr. Tucker said. “That's its very reason for existence. However, there are a few subsidiaries for you to consider.”

Sarah frowned. “Such as?”

“As for the cremation itself”—he lowered his voice—“you have a choice. Mr. Rossi paid for a direct cremation, which includes our standard container of either cardboard or particleboard, and refrigeration in lieu of embalming, all inclusive.”

“Oh, God,” Alison said. “You're putting him in a cardboard box?”

“For a small fee, you can select an alternative container, such as one made of composition materials.”

“What is that?”

“It's just composition materials. Space age.” He smiled, proud of the recent developments in the burning of bodies.

“It all turns to ash anyway,” Sarah said. “What's the diff?”

Alison closed her eyes. It was helping, in a way, to be talking like this. Helping to distance her from the fact that he was, simply, gone.

Mr. Tucker leaned back in his squeaky leather chair and let his glasses rest on their tether. “Now, as for the disposition of the cremains—”

Alison looked up. “Cremains?”

“Yes, ma'am. The ashes themselves. You have a choice of urn design, or you can stay with the one picked out by the deceased.”

“Well, he picked it,” Sarah said. “Wanna stay with that?”

Alison was still stuck on the word
cremains
. It felt so horribly diminutive, given what it described. A word invented by advertisers, along the lines of
brunch
, or
telethon
. Sarah tugged her sleeve.

“Well…maybe. Let's see the one he picked out.”

“Excellent idea,” Mr. Tucker said. He left through a side door in his office and came back a few minutes later carrying a cheap plain brass box, like something meant to hold recipes.

Alison took it when he offered it, turned it in her hands. “This is it?”

“Our economy urn, yes.”

“But it's not an urn, it's a box.”

Sarah took it from her and worked the tiny latch.

“Urn is more its function, ma'am.”

“I don't think so,” Alison said. “An urn is urn-shaped, right? It looks more or less like a vase.”

“An urn,” Mr. Tucker said, irritation edging his voice, “is a container meant for holding the cremains of the deceased.”

“If I put ashes in my sneaker, does that make my sneaker an urn?”

“Alison, it's okay. Calm down,” Sarah said. Alison drew a deep breath and nodded. Why was she so upset over the stupid urn? It didn't mean anything; it wasn't Mr. Rossi. She remembered feeling the same way after Marty died, angry that the mundane world kept stamping along its way, angry that papers had to be signed, checks turned over, catalogs consulted. It turned death into—she didn't know what, exactly. But she could imagine that, someday, every funeral arrangement would be handled by Wal-Mart.

“We have more traditional urns,” Mr. Tucker said, his own exterior smoothed back into place. “We have one with the Last
Supper
done in scrimshaw. Another with a beautiful painting of a trout fisherman in the river, if the deceased was one for that.”

“We'll stick with this one,” Sarah said. “It'll be fine.”

That night, there was a dance lesson, but no one danced. They all sat around drinking coffee, remembering Mr. Rossi, making him better, more well liked than he really had been. We redeem the dead in this way, the way Alison had spent the early days after Marty's death watching their last Ocean City video over and over, remembering it as the time of their lives, instead of a trip she hadn't wanted to take and he had insisted on. The Harmons, Mrs. Skidmore, and Lila Montgomery seemed sad, but not too sad—this loss, Alison imagined, just another chip in the stone that had been chipped away at for so long now. They'd been through this many times before and would again. They drank their beer and coffee and tea, comforted Sarah and Bill, and sprinkled sweetness and laughing over the fresh memory of Mr. Rossi. What else was there to do? Near midnight, Alison slipped out the back into the bite of autumn cold and made her way to the garage. She had left a message for Max but was unsure at this point whether to expect to hear back from him or not. And still Mr. Kesler had not made any appearance, the others puzzled, too, over his disappearance. Maybe he and Max had simply ceased to exist, the whole Kesler bloodline absorbed back into the nothingness it had come from.