God and poker saved your father’s life. You’ve heard variations of this your whole childhood: at produce stands, department stores, the diner where you eat supper every Tuesday night. You’ve heard it at his auto shop a million times. He tells customers in the lobby, out in the lot. He’ll thump his cane against their tires and say, “God and poker saved my life.”
The pieces and parts of his stories are always in motion, always changing. Sometimes he won the cigarette case off a soldier with a straight flush, other times eights and queens. Sometimes it was an officer, other times a kid fresh out of Camp McCoy. Sometimes they were at the Battle of Bloody Ridge, other times the Punchbowl. Sometimes the air tasted like honey, sometimes it was too hot to breathe, and sometimes it was so cold they had to sleep four men to a foxhole. Sometimes he could hear the enemy fire approaching as he laid demolition wire, other times it was an ambush—no warning.
The only part that never changes is how the cigarette case stopped a bullet meant for his heart, but not the one that severed his tibial nerve. He always rattles his cane and jokes, “God’s gotta keep you humble.”
In all his storytelling, if he ever mentions your mother it’s only to say he met her on a bus to Atlantic City after the war. Another lucky day. But when people ask about her—because they always want to know where she is now—he says, “I’m afraid she’s gone.” He likes to make it sound as if she’s dead, not off living another life. This is easier. It’s like God and poker. People want stories that make sense, that don’t leak.
And, of course, when you follow him around with his tools, they always ask about you.
“A girl mechanic?” they say.
Your dad always corrects them. “The Junior Mechanic,” he says.
When you’re not at school, you spend every moment with your dad. In the afternoons, you walk to his auto shop on Madison. You do homework in a room that smells like rust after a rain. When the other mechanics call in sick, your dad hollers at you to drop the books and get in the garage.
He leans against open hoods while you hold his cane. It’s still warm from his touch, heavy in your hands. He teaches you to use wrenches, to wheel yourself under engines, to report what you see. When his leg is acting up, he talks you through repairs. Tells you which bolts to loosen, which wires to disconnect, which parts of the engine you should never, ever touch without his supervision.
At school, other girls scrunch their noses when you enter the classroom. The boys don’t look at you at all. Your teacher hands you yellow slips of paper and tells you to report to the principal’s office. You sit on plastic chairs in the hallway, unable to return to class until you’re following the dress code. It’s always Aunt Mary-Claire who arrives to recuse you, and she always walks with a cigarette in one hand and a tartan dress in the other. Hunter green, scarlet red, bumblebee yellow.
She leads you to the bathroom. You change inside the stall. She flicks ashes in the sink. “Your dad,” she says. “I swear.”
Once dressed, you hand her your old clothes. She untangles the knots in your hair. Licks her thumb to scrub stains from your neck. The bathroom smells like the garage. Rust and rain. Her combs hurt your scalp. When you cry for her to stop, she yanks harder.
“You should have been a boy,” she says. “It’d be easier for everyone.”
You watch yourself transform in the water-spotted mirror. The pain does not make you beautiful, just cleaner. Sometimes there’s a knock at the door and then a teacher bops her head inside and says, “You can’t smoke here, ma’am!”
Aunt Mary-Claire sucks her cigarette and says, “This place.”
You still go to work after school. Your hair smoothed, your cheeks pinched, your shoulders tight inside the tartan dresses.
Your dad leans at the register, flipping through books on probability. “Got a full garage, Junior.”
“I’m all dressed up,” you say.
“Then change,” he says.
When your dad is out of town, you spend long weekends at Aunt Mary-Claire’s. You sleep on the living room couch. All night, orange light buzzes through the curtains. In the daytime, you find places to hide. All your cousins will eat is boxed mac and cheese. Aunt Mary-Claire always puts a squirt of mustard in with the milk. When Uncle Fred is home, everyone stays out of his way. Whenever the phone rings, Aunt Mary-Claire grabs her soft pack of Camels. If it’s your dad, you can tell how well he did at the casino by how many cigarettes she lights. One means he’s coming home with money. Two or three means he’s telling stories: a pickpocket swiped his wallet at the airport; a loopy hotel clerk double charged him for the room; he got a flat tire driving back from Atlantic City and—can you believe it?—he, of all people, forgot to pack a spare.
You never become what anyone would call a good student, but you’re not a bad one either. You breeze through math and English, but get marks taken off for handwriting. You swap sugar for salt in Home-EC, destroying cheesecakes. Every time you try to enroll in shop class, the guidance counselor says it’s not safe for girls. Sometimes you feel like you exist in a bubble and while you can see out of it, no one else can see in. At lunch, you float through the cafeteria with bags of apples and ham sandwiches. Being invisible kills you, but it also feels like the thing that saves you. Boys never bother you. Girls don’t tease you. Teachers forget your name. In class, they call you Katie or Laura or Becca and you don’t correct them.
Every day after school, you go to work. In tenth grade, you inherit an old set of coveralls a mechanic left behind when he got called up for Vietnam. He was small for a guy and your dad said, “It’ll fit you perfect.” Sometimes, as you button it, you picture the mechanic in dusty barracks, sweat-soaked, playing cards, telling stories about the blowhard he used to work for back in Cleveland, Ohio who claimed cigarette cases could stop enemy fire. Sometimes when you’re wearing it, customers joke and call you “Freddie,” and you don’t correct them.
One day when you’re stocking brake pads, a boy from high school stands at the counter. He’s tall, dark-haired, and dressed in cross-country shorts. He doesn’t notice you but his father, who’s an older, balder version of him, glares at you from across the garage.
“Hey, Hank,” he says, “you got any real mechanics working here?”
“Well, Dan,” Dad says, “I’m afraid Nixon sent ‘em all to Saigon.”
“Oh, you’ve gone hippie now?”
“What can I do for you, Dan?”
“It’s my kid’s first car. I want to make sure it’s up to snuff.”
“Alright,” Dad says, taking the keys. “We’ll take her for a spin, let you know.”
You follow him to the parking lot, leaving your classmate and his father inside the shop. It’s a nice car, a 1961 red Rambler convertible with white accents. Minimal dents and scratches. You sit in the passenger seat. Your dad tosses his cane in the back and takes the wheel. Warm wind hits your face, smelling of late summer and exhaust fumes. But the engine sounds like it’s got a sack of quarters caught inside. Coins shaking in a cup.
You find a paperback in the glove box: La Peste by Albert Camus. You flip pages, wondering if your classmate actually understands French or if he only pretends to. When you return to the shop, you slip the paperback inside your coveralls. You reach into the backseat and grab your dad’s cane as he delivers the news.
“She may be a looker,” he says, “but I’m afraid she’s a clunker.”
Later you sit in bed reading through the margins of La Peste, wondering if it’s something your classmate needs for school. Are you the reason he’ll have to tell his teacher he couldn’t read the assigned chapters? In the margins, the notes are written in English. Sometimes in blue ink, sometimes pencil. The cursive is loopy and feminine. Neat. Precise. For some reason, this thrills you, imagining he writes like a girl.
You trace your fingers over a handwritten note at the top of one of the pages:
Can one be a saint if God does not exist?
You fall asleep, wondering.
In the morning, you still wonder. You fill the percolator with coffee and water and wonder why your dad, who never goes to church, would think God once helped him cheat at cards just so he could win a cigarette case to place in his pocket for when he got shot in the chest on the battlefield of a war with no clear-cut victory. Over breakfast, you ask if he really, truly, thinks God exists.
He sips coffee and flips through the paper, pen in hand. The sports section, always sports. “Well,” he says, “it’s more probable that He does than He doesn’t.”
“But what do you believe?”
He circles baseball scores. “I believe in probability.”
After school, you head to the library. It smells like hot leather and newsprint. You scour the fiction shelves, searching for Camus. You find an English copy of The Plague and sit down in a sunny window. You read with the French copy at hand, checking between the text and your classmate’s handwritten notes. You scribble your favorite lines in a separate notebook, in a messy language only you can read.
The town itself, let us admit, is ugly.
A few days later, you find the red Rambler in the high school parking lot with the folding top down. You write a note in French, cobbled together from dictionary definitions and workbook examples:
J’aime un garcon qui lit Camus, mais il ne sait pas que j’existe.
You drop the paperback behind the passenger seat. You run away, feeling sick. It’s a relief, the next day, when he walks past you in the hall. Never looking back.
You work the counter when your dad is out of town. Sometimes he calls and asks you to take money from the safe to a Western Union. But you’ve seen the letters from the bank. You know the war is not the reason he can’t keep a staff. Each time you try to talk to him about it, he says, “It’s my money, Junior.”
You tell Aunt Mary-Claire in confidence. She of all people will understand.
But she waves an unlit cigarette in her face—the one she sucks on all day to help her quit smoking—and all she says is, “Your dad.”
One summer day, you drive to Western Union in bubbling heat. The air is soupy, reeking of chlorine. You pass other auto shops. Lots filled with cars. Hoods popped. At stoplights, you notice wildflowers sprouting from cracks in the curb. Beauty in ugly places. It makes you think of La Peste, and how winter was the only pleasant time of year in Oran.
You wire the money to your dad, trying not to imagine all the other things he ought to spend it on: new tools, the leaky roof, repaying the bank. He only believes in probability when the odds don’t apply to him. You start to wonder if there’s a difference between doing the right thing and doing what’s expected. This is your dad’s money, yes, but you already know that one day he’ll call and there won’t be anything left to send. What would Camus say?
The next time your dad calls from Atlantic City, you do as you’re told. You open the safe, pack the cash, and head to Western Union. They don’t open for another hour. Next door, you eat a plate of runny eggs and grab the newspaper the last customer left behind. You fill out the crossword puzzle, skim obituaries, read the classifieds. A 1961 red Rambler convertible is for sale down the street and you wonder if it’s his.
By the time you leave, the Western Union has opened but you keep walking, feeling the cash inside your front pocket. You head to the address listed in the classifieds. It’s not a big house, not what you expected. One story, brick exterior, a bushy dogwood covering the front windows. The red Rambler sits in the driveway, facing the street, a sign in the windshield asking for six-hundred dollars. You know that’s more than it’s worth. You know what’s inside.
You walk up to the door and knock. Part of you hopes the boy who reads Camus will answer, but it’s his father. Arms crossed, gazing down at you the same way he did at the shop—like he’s trying to figure out a math problem.
“You’re Hank’s girl,” he says.
“I’ll give you four hundred bucks for the Rambler,” you say.
“It’s six, sweetheart.”
“You know it’s a clunker. My dad said so.”
“Well, what do you want it for then?”
“I’ll give you four hundred,” you say, holding the envelope. “Cash.”
This goes back and forth for a while, until, finally, he says, “Fine, you want it so bad, you can have it.” He walks inside and returns with the keys and pink slip.
“Can I give you some advice?” he says. It doesn’t sound like a question and he doesn’t wait for your response. “You,” he says, “could be a pretty girl. But you sure don’t let anybody see it.”
A sack of quarters shakes inside your stomach. The way he gazes at you feels as if he’s trying to both unpeel your skin and stitch it back together for you. Behind him, the house is dark and smells of lemon cleanser. Artificial and antiseptic.
“Okay, thanks,” you say, taking the keys.
He lingers on the porch, watching as you head to the Rambler. The first thing you search for is the book, hoping—for some reason—it’s still there. But the car is clean, the upholstery reeking of lemon cleanser. On the drive, the engine sputters. Smoke rises from the hood at traffic lights. Still, you take the scenic route home, along the lake. Charred oil and citrus in the wind.
After you buy the Rambler, your dad’s so mad he kicks you out of the house. He says not to come back to the shop either. He’s done with you.
You say he’s got a gambling problem, and this was your way of trying to show him. “You’d have just lost it,” you say. “Like you always do.”
“This is theft,” he says, “you stole from me.”
“You’re not good at gambling. God, Dad, why can’t you accept that?”
“I take care of you. I provide for you. And this is how you repay me?”
“When was the last time you picked up a wrench?”
“You’re just as stupid and selfish as your mother.”
This hurts in an unexpected way. Not because you’re scared of being like a woman you’ve never known. It’s because his intention is to hurt you. And, until then, you never thought any of the harm he caused you was on purpose.
It takes everything to swallow your tears, to stop the quarters rattling in your gut.
You race to Aunt Mary-Claire’s. When you tell her what happened, you expect she’ll offer you shelter, take your side. She’s been through it with him too.
Instead, she raises her soggy cigarette and shakes her head.
“You two,” she says.
A week later, he calms down. He asks you to come home, come back to work. He never says he’s sorry. Neither do you. This is just how it will be from now on: both of you knowing exactly who the other is. You need each other too much to compromise beyond that.
He lets you keep the Rambler as long as you promise to fix it up and sell it for a profit. You work on it late at night, before school in the mornings. You take Polaroids and hang them around town. You decide to embrace it for what it is. She used to be a clunker and now she’s looking for a second chance.
You get six-fifty for her.
But you tell your dad you only got five.
Years later, after the bank finally takes the shop, your dad goes on disability and moves in with Aunt Mary-Claire. The kids are out of the house and Uncle Fred’s been gone for years. She doesn’t seem to mind having her younger brother around. It’s not a bad roll of dice for either of them.
Whenever you’re in town, you swing by their place. Your dad’s almost always waiting for you in the driveway, ready to thump his cane against the tires of your new clunker, inspect the engine, fiddle with the controls.
You always climb into the passenger seat and toss him the keys.
On your drives, he tells stories. Coming from anyone else, these would be mundane accounts: trips to the grocery store, afternoons at the track, prescriptions for new glasses, how Aunt Mary-Claire cheats at Jeopardy!. But his stories are tales of suspense, the details sharp and polished. His pauses expertly planned around cliffhangers. Over the years, the more you hear him tell the same tales, the more you realize he’s always tinkering with them. Always patching weak spots, tightening fuel lines, replacing loose bolts. He’s untruthful, yes, but it’s only because he knows you’ll listen longer.
When you stop for lunch, he knows everyone at the diner by name. The customers, the servers, the line cooks who lean out of ticket windows and say, “Hey, Hank, what’s good?” Your dad introduces you as the “Junior Mechanic.” Everyone already seems to know who you are, but he explains that you’re his daughter who travels the world restoring old cars. He tells them how you scour junk yards for hidden beauties, how you rescue rusted-out classics from forgotten lots, how you document it all for glossy magazines. Your clients are millionaires, billionaires, big celebrities who collect antique convertibles. They fly you all over the world on their private planes. You once rescued a waterlogged 1964 Jaguar E-Type for an English duchess after she went on a bender and crashed it in a marsh. You spent a summer in Italy working on race cars. You ate octopus with Mario Andretti. You worked on movie sets in Hollywood for half a decade. You showed Michelle Pfeiffer how to drive stick shift. You know all the tricks behind the scenes—what’s real, what’s not, who’s phony. When he really starts exaggerating, you don’t stop to correct him. You let him go on.
