The first and only time I met the owner of Goodman’s Auto Paint and Repair was Friday after school when a mockingbird was screaming like an air raid siren and the sky was ripe with blood—there I saw Joe blowing all this junk around with a leaf blower in the lot all crazy-like, and when he spots me he shuts it off with shaking hands and shuffles over with something like a smile on his face; the first thing he asks me is what kind of car I drive and if I’d seen his new sign out front (I hadn’t; there was a layer of dust and grime caked on the glass like a blanket that covered anything worth seeing, and for all I know, twelve-year-olds can’t drive cars); when I don’t laugh at his joke, he steps in front of me on the sidewalk, and I step back and wrinkle my nose (there’s a stench of piss or paint or something sour as he comes closer, like Nana’s cat’s litter box when it sits for too long); Joe says he’s seen me before, that little boy walking on the street, and he points to the window again with a finger that shakes like a dying man; look, he says, look at the sign, you’ll see it right there, and then I feel his hands latch tight on my belly—my eyes go to the window, and for a moment the sun sprays through the glass and all I can see is a great flash of light; I blink, and when my eyes adjust, I see a girl in the window, a baby girl, watching me with beady eyes from a pink and black car seat; she’s strapped in tight, lolling there as she chews on her thumb like a greasy chicken bone (I wonder if she’s always propped there, like some kind of baby doll or bobblehead on a shelf); I still can’t see the sign, but in the reflection I see a billboard from the church across the street, and it says God Will Wash Away All Tears, but between the dusty glass and the little girl in the window, the last word is covered, so it reads all scary-like: no tears, no tears, no tears—I don’t know why Joe is touching me, but there’s tears in his eyes and he holds me sharp like I’m about to blow down the street, and before I know it I pull away and run towards home, faster and faster than I’ve ever run before, and over the trill of traffic I hear him all squeaky-like as he steps into the street and shouts for me to come back, come back, come back, his voice slick with something deep and unfamiliar, and he says that Goodman’s is always open, that they’re cleaning up, remodeling big-time—come by tomorrow, I hear him say, where, just for me, there will be a special sale on tires.