“Seventy-two,” Timmy said.
“Oh, right, the headlamps. They went back to the singles, for whatever reason.” She peered through the passenger window. The leather seats looked smooth and glossy. The dashboard was a marvel of midcentury futurism, the dials and gauges ringed in chrome.
“I just got it back from the body shop,” said Timmy. “That’s fresh paint. I need to drive it over to my buddy’s garage, but I wanted you to see it first.”
“It’s yours?”
“For now,” said Timmy. “I picked it up last summer for cheap. I figured I’d put a few grand into it and double my money.”
She wanted to ask why anyone would sell such a car; how, if such a miraculous object came into your possession, you could ever part with it. The question seemed too personal. He was just her weed dealer.
Such a car could take a person anywhere, to an entirely different life.
3
When Claudia was growing up, her uncle Ricky worked at a body shop in town, and for a while she spent a lot of time there. In later years she’d be busy after school, minding two or three fosters, but at the time they had only one. Erica was easy, a quiet, shell-shocked girl who was always hungry. As long as she was eating, she was happy, even if it was only grape jelly and soda crackers. Claudia’s mother complained that the child was eating them out of house and home, but crackers, even Zesta or Krispy, weren’t expensive. The ones Deb bought, in plain white cartons labeled SALTINES, were practically free.
Each day after school, Claudia put Erica in front of the TV with a box of crackers. Then she rode her bike across town to Street Rodz, where the guys would be jacking up a rear end or ripping out an original bench seat to replace it with buckets, atrocities that should be covered under the Geneva Convention. Besides these “customizations,” Street Rodz also offered detailing. Claudia was a skinny kid, small enough to wedge herself into tight spaces, and for two dollars an hour she attacked seats and floor mats with a shop vac. It was criminal what people did to their cars. She vacuumed out pounds and pounds of dog hair, cigarette butts, shredded Kleenex. Under the seats she found candy wrappers, costume jewelry, roach clips, used condoms—and often, a few dollars in coins. She was allowed to keep whatever she found.
It was the first time in her life she had money of her own, which would have been incentive enough, but she also liked the cars. Most were junk, but a few were authentically beautiful: a Plymouth Belvedere, midsixties vintage; a ’63 Ford Falcon in mint condition—kept for years in a widow’s garage, her dead husband’s pride and joy.
In the 1980s these models weren’t as rare as they are now. Sometimes you even saw them on the road, the sort of rusted-out wreck a teenager could pick up for a hundred bucks and spend his entire adolescence lying under, trying to get the thing to run. Later, in high school, Claudia would date one of those boys, a mute gearhead with black fingernails. At Clayburn High almost nobody had a car, but if you did, that was who you were.
She loved the body shop, with its smell of tires and Turtle Wax. She even liked the guys. Growing up in a female household, she was unnerved by deep voices and especially, male laughter. But the body shop guys—Ricky, Roy, Tip, and Gary—laughed all the time, so she got used to it. The body shop guys found themselves hilarious. They cursed and crowed, they waged meaningless arguments: the best sandwich, bass guitarist, kung fu movie. The most lethal poisonous snake. The best goalie of all time. Each guy had a role to play—Ricky the wiseass, Roy the mimic, Tip the straight man. Gary, the quiet one, spoke only in riddles: Polish jokes, blonde jokes. His jokes were never funny, which made them funny.
The body shop guys ignored her completely, which was all she wanted. She zoned out and listened to the radio, Led Zep or Iron Maiden or sometimes, the oldies station. This happened mainly on Fridays, when the owner, an old greaser with a graying pompadour, stopped by. The owner was a throwback in every way: his hair slick with Brylcreem, the novelty bowling shirts he wore to hide his high belly, which began at the sternum. He had a surprisingly beautiful tenor voice, and when he sang along with the Beach Boys or Del Shannon, Claudia fell a little in love with him.
She also fell in love with the Falcon. Due to its age and pristine condition, it was kept in an indoor bay, and once, when the guys were busy at the front of the shop, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Its interior smelled of lube and gasoline and some kind of male grooming product, deodorant or aftershave.
She didn’t sit in the driver’s seat. She sat in the back like a daughter on television. A cherished daughter being driven somewhere, her mother in the passenger seat, her father at the wheel.
IT WAS AN ACKNOWLEDGED FACT IN THE BIRCH FAMILY THAT Claudia was born out of wedlock, an expression used without irony in their part of Maine. Even her mother used it. Claudia can remember her talking on the phone to Aunt Darlene, about a wedding announcement in the Clayburn Star. Deb knew for a fact that the bride had a kid already, born out of wedlock.
Wedlock. The word sounded ominous, punitive, faintly medieval. Also, wedlock rhymed with headlock, a word Claudia knew from WWF wrestling—a perennial favorite with the fosters, boys and girls alike.
The phone was a central feature of Claudia’s childhood, a princess model bolted to the kitchen wall, its receiver connected by a long spiraling cord. Stretched to its full length, the cord reached to every corner of the trailer so that Deb could spend every waking minute on it, as a princess would presumably do. While making dinner or changing diapers or washing dishes or sitting on the toilet, she squabbled with her mother or gossiped with Darlene, their conversations punctuated with cawing laughter. She was happier on the phone than off it, and who could blame her? Trapped in a trailer with a pile of hyperactive kids, many people would do worse.
Claudia knew little about the circumstances of her conception, because her mother was a prude and a secretive person generally. Deb had given birth at seventeen, which meant dropping out of high school; her parents—stern Yankees who believed in paying the piper—weren’t about to clean up a daughter’s mistake. The man who got her pregnant was older and married and did not in the end divorce his wife, as Deb wanted him to do.
The man who got her pregnant. That’s how Claudia thought of him. That is what he was.