Twenty
Boyce
Before my mother turned up, Sam had grown used to daily chitchats with Pearl when she came home from class. After dumping her backpack inside, she’d come out to the garage with cold Pepsis and let Sam show off whatever she was working on that day. I tried to put a stop to it once, pretty damn sure Pearl was as uninterested as a non-mechanic could be in the dirty details of a head-gasket repair, but she told me to hush and let Sam finish.
That night during supper, I’d told Pearl there was no need for her to suffer through one-sided conversations about transmissions and oil pumps just to keep from hurting Sam’s feelings. The kid loved cars more than anyone I’ve ever known aside from myself, but she was bright enough to comprehend that most of the time even people who brought their cars in just wanted us to do the work—they didn’t want to hear a speech about it.
“There’s actually a connection between describing something to someone and learning it at a deeper level yourself,” she said. “When I was a sophomore, I tutored a couple of my Chi-O sisters who were struggling with first-year biology. Pretty simple stuff. But breaking those basic concepts down and explaining them actually helped me in my more advanced courses.”
She’d tutored Maxfield through practically every class at the end of junior year when he’d been half a fuckup from failing out. “So you’re letting Sam bore the crap out of you to help her.”
“It’s ten or fifteen minutes.” She smiled. “Very little can bore the crap out of me in fifteen minutes. Besides, I remember you and Lucas discussing cars and car parts in high school, so animated and engaged that anyone watching y’all would’ve thought you were talking about boobs.”
“Oh, we discussed those plenty often too.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure.”
Sam had formed something between a little-sister thing and a crush on roommate, so she noticed when Pearl stopped coming home after class. “Where’s Pearl?” she asked after several no-Pearl days, all no big deal except for the way her voice rose like a cracked bell, not quite in tune.
“She’s avoiding my mother.”
Leaning into the engine next to me, Sam pulled up so fast she almost fell over. “Why?” she said, grabbing hold of the front end briefly to right herself, ignoring the way I lunged for her arm. She never asked for help. If she needed something, she demanded it. I can’t reach. Lower the lift. After she was in the truck and screwing with the radio last week, her dad told me she’d been born with a spinal disorder, adding that she’d been scrapping her way toward self-reliance since birth. Big surprise. Not.
“What’d your mom say to her? Did you let your mom kick her out?” she asked, her fist balled like she was prepared to sock me if I’d had anything to do with Pearl’s disappearance. “I thought this was your place. Did you kick her out?”
“Settle down. Jesus. Nobody kicked anybody out. It’s… complicated.”
She frowned at the worn-out hose in her hand, halfway detached and briefly forgotten. “I’m pretty smart, y’know. I can follow complicated.”
I sighed. “Fine. But you can’t talk to Pearl about it. At all. Understand?”
She felt for her chair’s handles and lowered herself into it. “Why not?”
I stared at her.
“Okay, okay,” she huffed. “I never see her now anyway.”
I finished detaching the coolant hose while I spoke. “My dad died in May. He and my mom—who took off when I was seven—never divorced, which was news to me. So everything is hers—including the garage. She thought I was just going to run the place for her until she sells it or whatever she plans to do with it. Fuck that—but I promised Pearl a place to live until mid-August, so I worked a deal with my mom. I’ll stay and keep running the garage until Pearl moves back to Austin. Then I’m gone.”
“She’s moving away? And… you’re leaving town?”
“I can’t stay and watch my mother pull to pieces everything I’ve built. I have to get the hell out of here, at least for a while.”
“So I won’t have a job anymore either, come fall.” Her crushed tone was hell.
I nodded. “Sorry about that, Sam.”
She stared into her lap. “Sorry about your dad.”
“You don’t need to be sorry about him. He was nothing like your dad. He was just something I survived.”
She scratched her thigh with a grease-lined fingernail, thinking. “What do you think will happen to Wynn’s Garage? Obviously your mom isn’t gonna run it. She never even comes out here.”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” I wished like hell that was true.
“This sucks,” she said.
She had no idea. I had less than six weeks left with Pearl.
Pearl
A few months ago, I read an article that linked anxiety to inattention to accident-proneness. Fascinating, I mused, and didn’t think about it again—until now.
During lab this morning, I dumped a petri dish full of phytoplankton and the water in which they were swimming on my shirt. Thankful no one noticed, I refilled the dish and conducted the series of measurements as expected, but this was three for three. First the beaker. Then last week I’d tripped over a taped-down cord in the lab and sloshed scalding hot coffee over my hand, which might have gone unnoticed had I not spit out a Boyce Wynn-worthy string of curses right after. (“Nice,” one of the visiting undergrads said, sending me a flirtatious grin, because being chatted up is what a girl wants when her hand is on fire.)
I might have been inured to the sulfurous odor emanating from my shirt, but I knew Minnie wouldn’t welcome me smelling like a science experiment during my four-hour shift at the inn, and the liquid had left a conspicuous blotch of discoloration as well, so I went home after class to change, cussing my recent spate of carelessness while acknowledging the thrill that zipped through me at the excuse to see Boyce during the day. I missed my weekday chats with Sam too.
Since Ruthanne kept her hail-battered Ford coupe parked on the gravel next to Boyce’s car, I’d begun parking my GTI on the street on the opposite side of the trailer. Inside, she sat on the sofa, alternating her attention between her phone and daytime television. We ignored each other, per usual. I dumped my backpack on the kitchen table and grabbed two Pepsis from the fridge.
Neither Boyce nor Sam had seen me arrive when I wasn’t expected home, nor did they see me back away from the mouth of the garage, processing the conversation I’d overheard.
I put the sodas back into the fridge as my thoughts spun, stretching and twisting like they’d been threaded through a taffy machine. Boyce had no hopes or remaining aspirations concerning the garage or his relationship with his mother. He had continued working for her for one reason: the promise he’d made to me.