Chapter 3 - The Mechanics of GraceWarren's shop on West Boundary Street had three bays, an office that smelled of WD-40 and chicory coffee, and a floor of poured concrete that had been sealed against transmission fluid in 1982.
It was six in the evening when I arrived.
The hydraulic lift in bay two was up, holding an old International Harvester Scout with rusted rocker panels. Underneath the chassis stood Warren, wearing his blue work shirt with WARREN stitched in red oval script over his pocket. His arms were black to the elbows with graphite grease, his graying hair pulled back with a bandana he had washed so many times the paisley pattern had faded into gray smoke.
He heard my car door. He wiped his hands on a blue shop towel, dropped his wrench into a metal tray with a solid clonk, and walked out into the slant of the evening light.
"How was Vance?" he asked.
"He called the district attorney," I said.
Warren nodded once. He didn't ask if I was sad. He didn't offer a platitude about family being thicker than water. A mechanic knows that when a cylinder block is cracked through the water jacket, no amount of solder will make it hold compression; you either replace the block or you haul the carcass to the scrapyard.
He reached into the small refrigerator behind the office door and pulled out two bottles of cream soda. He popped the caps against the edge of the workbench and handed one to me.
"Your brother’s Lexus is sitting in the ditch outside the state patrol barracks on the bypass," Warren said, leaning his hip against the fender of an old Buick. "He hit the culvert about forty minutes ago. Rim was ground down to the hub. He didn't hurt nobody, but he blew a point-two-one on the breathalyzer."
I took a sip of the soda. It was cold, sweet, and tasted like the county fairs my grandmother used to take me to before my father decided that public gatherings were unseemly for girls of our station.
"Is he in the jail?"
"Central holding," Warren said. "Arthur Vance's lawyer was already there when the troopers brought him in. They set the bond at seventy-five thousand. Full cash or real property surety."
"Bernice doesn't have seventy-five thousand," I said. "And she doesn't have the property."
Warren looked at me over the rim of his bottle. His eyes were small, dark, and set deep behind thick, straight brows that had never learned how to look suspicious.
"She called the shop," Warren said.
My fingers tightened around the glass neck of the soda bottle. "When?"
"About four. Right after you left Elm Street."
"What did she say to you, Warren?"
Warren took a slow sip, swallowed, and wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm, leaving a streak of black grease across his wrist.
"She told me that if I was a Christian man, I’d make you deed that house back to the family trust so she could post the bond," he said. His voice was level, without any edge of anger. "She said you were an unnatural daughter who had been corrupted by city ideas and that I had a moral duty as the head of the house to correct you."
"And what did you say?"
Warren looked down at his boots—heavy Red Wings with steel toes that had saved his feet from three falling transmissions over thirty years.
"I told her," Warren said, "that in my experience, when an engine runs without oil for three years, the pistons seize up and weld themselves to the bore. And when that happens, you don't blame the oil pump for stopping; you blame the fellow who forgot to check the dipstick."
A tiny, wet laugh escaped my nose. I set the bottle on the workbench, walked across the two feet of concrete that separated us, and leaned my forehead against his shoulder.
The cotton of his work shirt was rough, stiff with dried sweat and soap, and it smelled of iron filings, mineral spirits, and the cedar shavings he kept in the bottom of his toolbox. It was the cleanest thing I had ever smelled in my life.
"She's all alone in that house, Warren," I whispered into his collar. "She has the television on, and she’s sitting there with that silver mirror, waiting for the neighbors to bring her a casserole."
"She won't starve, Elaine," Warren said, his heavy, grease-stained hand resting lightly on the middle of my back, right between the shoulder blades where the tension had lived since I was fourteen years old. "A woman like that don't starve. She feeds on her own grievances until the frost comes. The question isn't whether she’s hungry. The question is whether you’re going to let her eat your supper."
"We have to clear the house," I said. "The thirty days starts today."
"I've got the flatbed trailer," Warren said. "And the boys from the transmission shop will come over Saturday morning for twenty dollars an hour and a case of beer. We can have that furniture into the storage unit on Highway 17 before the sun gets high."
"I don't want to sell it," I said. "The furniture. It was my grandmother's. The sideboard was built by a freedman in Liberty County in 1870. My mother didn't buy it; she just lived around it."
"Then we’ll put it in our barn," Warren said simply. "The roof don't leak, and I’ll throw a coat of linseed oil on the legs so the termites don't take an interest. It can sit there until you want to look at it again. Or until you don't."
I closed my eyes.
For twenty-five years, every problem in my life had required an explanation, a defense, an itemized accounting of my failures, and a three-day period of maternal penance during which I was expected to clean something with ammonia to prove my contrition.
Warren Callahan didn't need an explanation. He had a flatbed trailer, four cans of linseed oil, and an understanding of friction that was older than the Common Law of England.
"Warren?"
"Yeah, Ellie?"
"Can we go home now?"
May you like
He reached up with his clean thumb, touched the corner of my eye where a stray drop of mascara had run, and smiled.
"Truck's running," he said.
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