Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  “Then damn all that mud, if it took your car,” she said. He nodded, seemed to relax a little. Maybe it was the best thing, to let herself be recruited, as Max called it.

  The evening slowly wound down, Sarah and Bill dancing with a straggler or two, going over the new moves, no music behind them. The others drank water. Mr. Kesler put on his cotton gloves to rebox his record collection. Alison walked over to Mr. Rossi, beside the cookie table.

  “So, Mr. Rossi, you ever hear about the War of Jenkins’s Ear?”

  “Why, yes, Alison. As a matter of fact, I have.” His face was impossibly pink, his ears almost glowing.

  She smiled. Of course he had.

  “At least six people have entered the history books because of ear loss,” he told her. “There was, most famously, van Gogh, of course, but no one remembers—”

  Just then, the phone on the table rang loudly, and Alison answered it. The voice on the other end, a man’s, was awkward and stumbling, asking for “Mrs. Sarah Michaels” as if reading it off a card. The voice was familiar somehow, like she’d heard it on the radio in the background of some kitchen.

  “Sorry,” she said, “Sarah can’t come to the phone, and if you’re selling something, it is after nine o’clock at—”

  “Who I need to speak to,” he said, “is a Mrs. Alison Durst, if she’s there. I gotta talk to her.” He said this with a stiffness and bulky formality that made her recognize the voice the way she would recognize a stomach punch: That quiet, stumbling voice belonged to Lem Kerns, the same voice that had echoed through the worst of her dreams, when she saw him forever on her front porch, tugging the flaps of his shirttails, bringing her the bad news.

  Repair of major damage cannot be readily carried out by the home mechanic. Damage to a major part is a job either for your Corvette dealer or a body repair shop.

  5

  * * *

  From the top of Holland Street, she recognized Lem’s battered blue station wagon sitting, as it so often had, in front of their house, the front wheels angled against the curb in case he forgot to set the brake again. The house itself, the cracked driveway, the side alleys and surrounding houses all looked strange and unfamiliar, the lawns overgrown more than she remembered, the faded stop sign on the corner replaced with a new one. Even the street seemed too narrow, the houses crowding one another for space. Her hands shook, her chest almost too tight for breathing.

  “You look like you need three or four drinks,” Max said. He pulled the truck to the side of the road, letting it ease slowly down the block. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Well, no. Not exactly. Two drinks might do it.”

  “This whole deal is pretty weird, huh?” He lit a cigarette and tossed the match out the window.

  She nodded, tugged the ends of her hair. “To say the least.”

  “Afraid you might run into him?”

  “Who?”

  “Your ex. He probably got the same phone call, right?”

  Her stomach tightened. “I don’t think he’s here,” she said.

  Eventually, she would tell him. She had to. The poor guy—already she was somebody else who had trouble delivering the straight truth to him. But she knew, too, that the thing she liked best about Max right now was that he didn’t know about her the way the rest of Wiley Ford did. And so she had called him that morning, apologizing for what happened in her garage two days ago, asking him for a ride to Cumberland, asking him to come back. It all felt so clean, having no real past in the eyes of this person. She could lose herself in her newness to him, fold herself into the void of her presence with him. Clean, bright, uncomplicated. All the mess of herself hacked away and hidden, no blood, no dripping guilt. Like a magic trick, her weighty past gone in the flash of his gaze. And she allowed that gaze, felt it lingering on her face, on her breasts when he thought she wasn’t looking. He flirted with her in his own blunt way, brought the heat of sex into the room with him, when everyone else she knew brought only the chill of politeness. How could she think of ending that with confession?

  They were close enough now that she could see her old house, the rusted roof bracket meant to hold the cutout Santa Claus Marty had made, the forsythia under the front windows overgrown and tangled, the fake alarm-system stickers peeling in the corners of the windows. Their car, an old Honda Civic that Marty had bought at an auction, sat at the back of the driveway, hidden under a green tarp.

  “Why don’t I come with you?” Max said. “See what all the fuss is about?”

  Actually, she wondered, too, what all the fuss was about. Lem didn’t say much in person, and even less on the phone. And last night when he’d called, the only thing she could get out of him was that there “was trouble with the house,” that she’d “best come see.” She’d told him she would try to make it out the next day.

  “Try?” Sarah had said. “This is your home we’re talking about. You have to go.”

  “Lem can take care of it,” she said. Lem had watched the house for her all this time, had mowed the grass once or twice in the summer, adjusted the heat when a freeze threatened the pipes. There was no mortgage; the house had belonged to Marty’s parents, who’d bought it in 1947 for two thousand dollars.

  But Sarah wouldn’t drop the idea, had kept hounding Alison, telling her she could not turn her back on her own home, could not turn her back on Lem. And in this she was right, Alison knew, as much as she did not want to go back there. Finally, she’d agreed to let Max take her the short hop across the river and back into Maryland, then pick her up a few hours later. Enough, she figured, to satisfy Sarah.

  But now she wasn’t so sure. She looked out the truck window at the house, her hand frozen on the door handle. Lem sat on the front stoop, looking at his fingernails as he chewed them down to nothing.

  “Three hours?” she asked Max.

  He shook his head. “Told you on the phone, I’m headed to Hagerstown. It’ll be five at least. I’ll hurry if you want.”

  She nodded, drew a long breath. “Yeah, I want.”

  Everyone she had ever come into contact with, it occurred to her once, was known mostly for one thing, identified that way. Mr. Beachy was a devout Christian. Sarah loved dance. Bill believed in most anything unexplained or unproven. Marty had liked to repair and build. Her father flew radio-controlled airplanes. Her mother organized all the local blood drives. Mr. Rossi knew trivia. Even herself…she was the Tragic Widow for a long while; by now she’d probably graduated to the Corvette Lady. Lem was no exception. People in Cumberland who had no idea of his name had known him for twenty-plus years as the Star Wars Guy. In 1978, he was in the newspaper for seeing the movie 129 times, a record in all of Maryland. He still carried that identity around with him, still kept old movie posters and framed articles on the wall of his house trailer, still wore Star Wars T-shirts and hats. He wore one now, with Darth Vader on the front, half-hidden under his work shirt.

  “Hello, Lem,” Alison said as he stood. He slicked his hair back with his hand and nodded at her. She felt suddenly embarrassed that she’d been away so long. Like she had just run from everything, while Lem—good, dependable Lem—stayed here and dealt with it.

  “We missed you around here,” he said, and she saw how nervous he was, pulling at his shirt, rocking from foot to foot.

  “How’re Pammy and Marshall?”

  “Oh, can’t complain,” he said. “Or I could, but nobody’d listen. Marshall is seventeen now.”

  Alison smiled. This was pretty much the same conversation—the only conversation—they’d had several hundred times.

  “We figure it was kids,” he said now, adjusting his glasses. They stood in some mirror-image version of two years earlier, he standing on the porch, she below, looking up.

  “What? What was kids?”

  “Aw shit, Alison. Some kids got in. They tore the place up pretty bad.”

  She shook her head, then saw the open door of her own house beyond his shoulder and understood. She started p
ast him and he took her arm in his big claw of a hand, held her there a second, then let go.

  The graffiti covered most of the living room wall. No serious stuff, nothing threatening, not in Cumberland—just a drawing of Kilroy, the name of some rock band, the words fuck and suck repeated a couple of times in fuzzy red paint, the drips dried in pools along the baseboards. In the middle of the room, her overturned coffee table held the abandoned spray cans, a torn bag of beer bottles, several condom wrappers, half a fast-food hamburger, and one of her china cups spilling cigarette butts. A series of holes had been kicked or punched in the walls and her glass bookcase had been shot full of BB holes. She moved slowly through the room, touching the edges of things. Lem followed her, futilely straightening and picking up as he went along. There was no graffiti in the kitchen, but the faucet had been left on at some point, and the water had overflowed on the linoleum, which was swollen and peeling. Alison stopped, took a breath. She turned and faced Lem.

  “More of the same all the way through,” Lem said. “Sheriff says he could name you the kids that did it, but he don’t have proof.”

  “Ah God, Lem. What the hell is wrong with people?”

  “I wish I knew,” Lem said. “Listen, me and Pammy will put everything back right. It looks bad, but we can do it.” Alison remembered hearing him saying this to Marty, no matter how easy or difficult the task that faced them.

  She looked around, noticing for the first time the smell—urine and spilled beer, and beneath that an attic smell of neglect and limbo. “Maybe, I don’t know, I should just hire somebody.”

  “They wouldn’t do it right. They wouldn’t care all that much. Listen, why don’t you come and stay with us until the work gets done?”

  “Thanks, Lem. But I don’t think I’ll be staying.”

  He blinked, pushed his glasses up. “Well, but you have to,” he said. “You can’t just leave things like this.” She looked at him. Never before had she heard anger in his voice, but it was unmistakable now.

  “I just meant—”

  “I should’ve been watching better.” He twisted his shirt. “Same when Marty died. Every two years, I have to apologize for not watching better. Difference this time is, I get to put it back right.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. She walked over to him and patted his arm, as thick as one of her own thighs. “Okay, Lem. We’ll do that. We’ll put it back right.”

  Later that afternoon, she stood in her ruined kitchen, dialing Sarah’s number. So much time had passed that she had to look it up in her address book, which she found heaped with other books at the bottom of the stairs, the pages singed by matches. The phone still worked for the same reason the water and electric did: She’d never bothered to have them turned off; the bills were paid through the bank.

  Sarah answered the phone, and Alison slowly described the destruction to the house.

  “Those damn kids,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t, either,” Alison said. She leaned on the butcher-block table, which had had one of its corners hacked away by a large knife. The duck decoy that Marty had carved from a kit sat on the stove, blackened with burn marks.

  “Is Lem there now? Somebody should be there.”

  “He’s home making dinner until Pammy gets off work. Max will be back in a few hours.”

  “Listen, do you want me to come there? I can cancel dance.”

  “No, don’t worry about it. I’ll be home by this evening.”

  “Alison…”

  “What?”

  “You are home. For the first time in two years.”

  “Yeah, how about that?” she said. But looking around, it felt wrong. It felt like—what? Like a monument. Like a trip to the cemetery. Like anything but home.

  They had ruined the bed, torched a hole in the middle of it and urinated on the floor all around it. In the bathroom, pieces of the mirror lay shattered in the sink. As she walked through the house, her mind tried to draw Marty out of every corner, to assemble him out of scraps of moments, half phrases, dimly lit mornings and sleepy conversations, a dropped button or a hunt for socks. But this was the wrong house, all of it broken and ruined and misplaced, as if her own neglect had done this, had dismantled everything through the violence of trying to forget. Violence had taken him, and now none of the violence that lay before her would hold him.

  Through the bedroom window she noticed Marty’s sagging tent still set up in the backyard, where some weekends he and Lem, like a pair of ten-year-olds, would camp out while she slept in their empty bed. She walked outside and opened the tent, thinking of all those mornings when he’d come into the kitchen smelling of beer and no sleep, mornings when she wouldn’t talk to him. The tent was an old boxy army-type that staked down with pegs, something Marty’d found at a yard sale. She wondered what had made her so angry about those nights, about all those days he’d spent with Lem in the basement, or at Lem’s house, or off somewhere in the car. Neglect, maybe. But strange as this sounded to her now, she knew that at least part of it had been jealousy—jealous that she’d never had that kind of time with him, that he hadn’t taken her on his random jobs or into his tent or down to the basement. But why would he have? She’d disapproved of all of it, was how it must’ve seemed to him. The things he loved she’d equated with negligence. If she didn’t like his life, why wouldn’t he keep it hidden from her? It made sense. And why had she been so rigid? Marty had been that kind of man—he lived inside his skin and inside his moments and hobbies and casual friendships, and the quiet strength that at first attracted her so had slowly twisted itself into a secret unwillingness. Unwilling to make his life into the kind of vessel that would hold children and a future, the kind that is warm and narrow enough to incubate the intimacy she’d thought she wanted.

  When they met, he was painting the apartment complex where she lived her first year of grad school. She met him one day in June when she’d gone to the pool for a swim and instead found the water all emptied, Marty down in the deep end with a long roller and a metal pan full of pale blue paint. His shorts and T-shirt were a collage of smears, his legs strong and tan. He stopped his work and told her to jump on in, the water was fine. She stood there, conscious of her pale stomach, of the baggy puckers of last year’s suit. She had a hangover and an overdue paper. She sat and opened her book while he muttered to himself and painted, interrupting his work and hers by trying to draw her attention. He puffed out his jaws and pretended to swim, bug-eyed. He pretended to paddle a boat all the way around the walls of the pool, his roller an oar. Finally, she gave in and laughed.

  Their differences were what she loved most about them, what gave them dimension and edges—the things she saw lacking in the academic couples she knew, who stood together at parties and drank wine and traded off their worry about teaching jobs. Marty had been all muscle and work and the sweet odors of paint and sweat and gasoline. She imagined that for him she seemed like someone serious enough to whisk him into a real life, though when she asked, he would only say she was the prettiest girl he’d ever been able to talk to. For a long time, she worried that it went no deeper than that. Once or twice, she dressed him up and took him to those parties, where he stood next to the sink in his corduroy jacket, drinking beer and trying to catch her eye, begging her with his gaze to leave. And the leaving excited her, making thin excuses and taking off on his strong arm into his narrow basement apartment, into sex, into the world outside grad school, followed by what she imagined to be the envious stares of her colleagues. She’d made a prop of him then, she knew, and the differences between them gave her the sense that she could belong to her world and another, could orbit two spheres. She was bigger that way. Her version of love would not be safe and planned, not tenured and worried.

  And then—time. The sediment of years weighed on them, pressing down their differences until they became flattened and one-dimensional, abstractions drawn on different parts of a page, no lines intersecting, no edges overlapping. S
pace became just the forced-air heat in the house, occupying the areas between his life in the basement and hers at the college. Just a blank expanse of nothing. And time, she knew, might have cured those differences as well, might have drawn them into one another through the slow gravitation of aging, the tectonics of children or long familiarity. But they would never have that chance, all that space filled with the dark matter of remorse and guilt.

  Just then, she heard the squeak and slam of the doors on Lem’s car, a sound that used to mean those two big men tumbling through her front door, filling her house with mud and profanity and sawdust, with another stupid argument over the right way to cut a board or a pipe. Now she heard Lem knocking at the front door, and Pammy’s small voice saying, “Maybe she left, honey,” until Alison walked around the corner of the house and called to them.

  Lem’s wife had always felt to Alison exactly like the sound of her name: Pammy. Cute and little but also somehow hard and no-nonsense. She was all of these, a native of Cumberland, a former drill squad cocaptain for the Franklin Falcons twenty years ago, who had moved from pom-poms and go-go boots to flannel shirts and work gloves and a pickup truck. Not quite five feet tall, she worked for the state park, grooming and shoeing horses that little kids rode around the dirt ring.

  She found Alison in the backyard and gave her a quick, muscled hug, not even glancing at the tent, which looked so odd in the daylight.

  “Been a while,” she said, cinching on her work gloves. She looked up, her eyes a flinty gray. “Let’s go knock this place back into shape.”

  Already, Lem had emptied the back of the station wagon into the middle of the living room and hallway: paint-spattered tools, sections of drywall, and paint and plastic bags from the building-supply store. They set to work, Lem measuring the wall, locating the studs, using a saw to cut squares around the holes that had been punched, a trickle of dust covering the toes of his work boots. Pammy set all the furniture back into place and began scrubbing at the stains on the carpet. Alison felt a little lost. What was she supposed to do? She wanted them to give her a job, like some little kid on an allowance, but they seemed to have forgotten her presence there. Lem hummed a mindless tune as he worked, and Pammy just worked, her face flushed, long hair held back by a bandanna around her head. Finally, Alison poured paint into the tray and went to work with a roller, going over the wall that had been spray-painted but not otherwise damaged.