by Pamela Morsi
He shrugged. “With a woman like Ann Marie anybody could lose count.”
Tom had a long list of car parts that he was chasing down over the internet. He could put a 2001 valve assembly in a ’91 model or change out a Chevy drive train for a Mercury. But when it came to a 1963 Impala bumper or an interior door panel on an ’81 T-Bird, his customers counted on him to scrounge through the almost infinite number of vintage dealers, antique metal specialties, hobby sites, pick-and-pulls and ordinary junkyards. He had to find the exact make and model. He couldn’t even bid on a restoration if he didn’t know that he could get the part and how much it was going to cost.
This was the kind of work that he could do at home. And with the shop as busy as it had been the past few weeks, he found himself playing catch-up. After dinner, he’d logged onto the laptop. In some ways it was a treasure hunt. It was exciting, especially when he found something that he needed, or stumbled on something that was really rare. But a lot of the salvagers were barely inventoried and lacking quick search capabilities, which forced him to read through long lists of car parts until his eyes nearly crossed with the effort.
With a sigh, he closed his computer and rose from the kitchen table, stretching tall and wide to snap out any kinks in his not-really-meant-for-desk-work frame.
He walked through the quiet house, curious about his family. Glancing out the back window, he saw Quint and Warren, Quint’s friend from down the street. They were running around the yard like crazy, occasionally freezing into a martial-arts stance before wildly kicking at the air. This was undoubtedly some game the two had made up. They might be kung-fu fighters. Or superheroes who did kung-fu fighting. Or androids with superpowers programmed for kung-fu.
Tom smiled. Even in his weird, disruptive childhood there had been moments of blissful fantasy. All kids deserved as much of that as they could get.
Sitting at the picnic table nearby, Erica had dragged outside a lamp attached to a long extension cord. She was bent over a thick pile of paperwork.
She’d told him over dinner about the new training assignment and that she needed to familiarize herself with the syllabus. They’d both agreed to spend the evening doing “homework.” Tom had done his in a quiet silence conducive to concentration. Erica chose to do hers on the picnic table with a background noise of hollering six-year-olds.
Naturally, somebody had to watch the boys. And just as naturally, that fact had not occurred to him in advance. He shook his head. Erica was not big on complaints. Nor was she likely to make demands. It might have been easier on Tom if she did. He knew exactly what to do to keep a car running in top shape. He could listen to an engine and diagnose a problem before he even raised the hood. But he had no idea about how a happy marriage worked. He wanted his to last forever, but he had no idea about what kind of regular maintenance was required.
“Okay,” he said aloud to himself. “She’s doing something just because it needs to be done. Look around and find something that needs to be done and do it.”
He walked through the house, looking for hinges that needed tightening, bulbs that needed replacement, boxes that needed to go up into the attic. Nothing. He walked through the kitchen. Dishes were done. Floor looked good. He even opened the fridge to see if it needed cleaning out. Everything looked fine.
He moved to the bathroom. Everything looked pretty good in there, too. As he was leaving, however, he noticed the hamper. Sure enough it was not only full it was stuffed.
Almost as pleased as if he’d just stumbled onto a radiator cap for a Stutz Bearcat, Tom carried the hamper out to the laundry room. He sorted everything on the floor and put a load of towels into the washer. With a quarter cup of detergent and a flick of the wrist, he started the machine up. He left the hamper there and went back through the kitchen.
The sounds of Erica and the kids drew him to the living room. The two boys looked worn-out.
“Did you get much work done out there?” he asked her.
“More than you’d think,” she answered. “Why don’t you walk Warren home and I’ll get Quint bathed and into bed.”
“Do I have to take a bath?” Quint’s words were more a whine than a question.
“Yes,” Erica answered, brooking no excuse.
“Yeah,” Tom added. “As dirty as you are, we’d have to throw that bed out if you slept in it.”
His son was still grumbling when he said goodbye to his friend, but he did head for the bathroom without resistance.
It was almost dark as Tom walked the half block to Warren’s house. The little fellow was yawning and beginning to drag his feet. They passed an SUV parked on the street. A teenage girl sat in the passenger seat. A guy, maybe twenty years old, had the hood up and was gazing cluelessly at the engine.
Been there, done that, Tom thought to himself. For car trouble there was no better teaching tool than being stuck on the side of the road. It made a young man think through all the pieces of the engine and how they worked together. Then he’d either figure it out or get some exercise with a long walk home.
Tom turned Warren safely over to his mother at the front door and headed back up the street toward home.
As he approached the SUV again, the young woman had stepped outside. She was heavily pregnant, her big belly as round as a basketball.
Tom sighed. He could let the boy fend for himself. But the girl needed help and he wouldn’t just pass her by.
He stepped off the curb and made his way toward the front of the vehicle.
“Hi, I’m Tom Bentley,” he said, offering his hand.
The young guy glanced up, defensively at first, but when he saw Tom’s hand, he shook it. “I’m Briscoe and this is my girlfriend, Kera.”
The pregnant person gave Tom a shy smile and a wave.
“I work on cars for a living,” Tom said, pointing to the logo on his shirt. “Why don’t you let me see if I can get you back on the road.”
“Great!” Briscoe said. “That would be great.”
The kid took a step back and folded his arms. There was an anger in him that belied his words. But Tom was not about to let him hand off his troubles to a passerby.
“Check the obvious things first,” Tom said, as if he were a teacher and the young guy his student. “Have you got plenty of gas?”
Briscoe nodded. “About a quarter of a tank, I think. All the gauges went dead just before she broke down. So I’m thinking it’s electrical or something.”
As Tom leaned in, he could feel the heat from the engine block. It was too much heat.
“Have you got a flashlight?”
The young guy didn’t. In fact, he didn’t have any tools at all. Even his jack was missing the screw. Tom was irked. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell the kid that he had no business driving a car even around the block if he wasn’t prepared for an emergency. But instead of biting the boy’s head off, he walked to his house and got his own tools from the garage.
“Of course, this kid is no kind of emergency planner,” Tom grumbled to himself. “Otherwise his little girlfriend wouldn’t be as big as a house.”
He grabbed a big jug of coolant as well and walked back to the stalled vehicle. The young woman had opened the back doors of the SUV and had seated herself on the floorboard. She was talking on her cell phone. Tom wondered if she was chatting with a friend or reassuring a worried mother.
The engine was still hot and it took him several moments, but he finally located a leak in the radiator hose. It was only a hairline crack right next to the clamp, but it was at just such an angle to blow hot steam against the fuse box.
“These may all have to be changed,” he told Briscoe. “But first try just taking them out and putting them back in. Do it one at a time, so you don’t get any in the wrong slot. They may surprise you.”
The young guy nodded appreciatively.
Tom unclamped the hose and wrapped the cracked area with several layers of duct tape before reclamping it.
“This will hold
for a while, but this hose has got to be replaced,” he said. “What you might do, is take this one off. Just loosen the clamps top and bottom, and take this one with you to the parts store. That way you’ll be sure to get the right one.”
“Okay,” Briscoe said.
“You’re going to be able to do this repair yourself and it’s going to save you a lot of money,” Tom said. “You’ll also have the assurance of knowing that it was done well, because you did it yourself.”
He could see from the guy’s expression that he wasn’t there yet, but that’s how people learned about cars. One repair at a time.
Tom filled the radiator with coolant that had been lost in the overheating. Before he shut the hood, he had Briscoe start it up. The engine sputtered a little and the battery whined, but it turned over and the motor sounded fine.
Both Briscoe and Kera cheered as if a touchdown had just been made at the football game.
“Wow, thanks!” Briscoe said. “This is great.”
“Now you’re going to get that hose taken care of tomorrow, right?”
“Tomorrow. Right. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
Tom nodded.
“Do I…do I owe you something?” Briscoe asked.
The words “no, nothing” came to Tom’s lips, but the sight of the heavily pregnant teenager attempting to hoist herself into the SUV’s passenger seat silenced him.
“Fifty dollars,” Tom said instead.
“Fifty?” Briscoe repeated, his voice unnaturally high.
“That’s the minimum charge for roadside service.”
“Oh…okay.” Briscoe pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and opened it wide enough to see inside with the aid of the flashlight. He counted out what he had and then went to Kera in the car. Tom waited patiently until the young guy returned. He handed Tom the money. They’d come up with the whole fifty dollars though three dollars of it was coins, including nickels.
Tom held the money in his hand for a few seconds and then stepped a couple of paces away from the vehicle and motioned to Briscoe to follow.
“I am going to give you this money back,” Tom said, holding the cash out to the young man. “Not that I don’t need it. I’ve got a wife and a son that count on me for support. But I see that you have Kera and a child on the way yourself. You may need it more than I do.”
“Thanks,” Briscoe replied, his voice tentative.
“Now since I’m giving you this money, that gives me some right to say what ought to be done with it,” Tom continued. “It will be yours and you can do what you like. You can pay for a radiator hose. For that much money you could probably buy three of them. Or you could just put it in your pocket and piddle it away. But there’s something I want you to think about spending it on.”
“Okay.”
“If I were you, I’d take my fifty bucks and go down to the courthouse and buy a marriage license.”
The young guy’s eyebrows shot up, clearly surprised at the suggestion.
“There is a lot more to being a parent than just getting somebody pregnant,” Tom said. “Your girl is getting ready to do something tough and painful and very scary. There is not much you can do to make it better. This is one thing you can do. You can make a commitment that says, ‘you’re not in this alone.’”
“I, uh…uh.” The kid looked genuinely scared.
“Being a husband is like changing a radiator hose,” Tom told him. “Once you figure out that it’s what you should do, all that’s required is the determination to follow through and the patience to keep working at it clumsily, until it finally begins to feel natural.”
Tom watched them drive off before making his way back home. He hoped, without a lot of optimism, that he’d made a difference in the kids’ lives. It wasn’t likely. People weren’t like cars. You couldn’t just spot the trouble, repair or replace the parts and make it run as good or better than new.
But people could change. Tom knew that. He’d seen it. He’d lived it. Sometimes unexpected things could turn a whole life around. And those things didn’t have to be big and dramatic. It could be little things. Maybe one little thing or a lot of little things.
Tom wasn’t even sure what had turned his own life around. He certainly wasn’t born heading in the right direction. Drug-addicted mother, father unknown, residence variable, concepts like home, family, stability were as foreign as some of the countries he’d awakened in. When he should have been in preschool, his mother, with or without her boyfriends, had dragged him through places like Medellín and Cali. By the time he was nine or ten, he’d occasionally been left on his own in Guadalajara and Juarez.
Tom’s mother died when he was eleven. It had been some force of personal will, some drive that came from an unknown source that had propelled him to step away from that life, where he knew he’d be welcome as a runner or a lookout, and seek the less-than-warm welcome of the over whelmed caseworkers of the Texas Child Protective Services.
What made people decide to ride their life off into the sunset rather than down the rabbit hole or into the toilet?
Tom didn’t know. But he was grateful for the direction he was headed. And if there was a way to pay it forward, he wanted to do that.
Inside his house, all was quiet. He walked down the hall way and peeked inside Quint’s room. In the glow of the night-light he could see his sleeping son, mouth open, face angelic.
He checked the master bedroom, but Erica wasn’t there. He wandered through the house and finally into the kitchen. In the door to the laundry room he spied his wife on her hands and knees mopping up the floor.
Tom’s question of why she might be doing that was completely obliterated from his thoughts by the sudden surge of testosterone that ignited his brain. Erica’s position fired up old porn flick fantasies of the sexy French maid. But his wife’s luscious backside didn’t require a frothy little skirt and black stockings. Her typical sleeping attire of a tank top and boxers with little pink hearts was just as sexy.
Tom dropped down behind her, his knees straddling her own. Erica made a startled, almost guilty sound. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pressing himself tightly against her before allowing his left hand to skim upward along her torso and his right hand to wander lower along her abdomen. He kissed her throat and whispered to her.
“Do you remember when we bought this house and I promised to make love to you in every room?”
“Uh-huh,” she answered, followed by a sharp intake of breath as his right hand reached its sought destination and he spread his fingers wide to take her entire genital area in his grasp.
“I think this room got left off our list.”
He pulled her tightly against him and, as if he couldn’t get close enough, he flipped her body around to face him and brought his lips down upon her own.
Tom lost himself in the kiss, the taste of her, the entry of her mouth, warm and wet and welcome. He could stay there forever…or maybe not. He had to get her clothes off. He had to get his clothes off. He had to discard the thin prison of fabric that kept her skin from his own.
He ended the embrace just long enough to grab the hem of her top.
“Tom, I need to tell you something,” Erica whispered.
“Just tell me that you want me,” he answered. “That’s all I need to hear.”
He pulled her shirt off over her head. Even in the stark light of the laundry room fluorescent, her breasts were gorgeous. They were, he thought, the perfect size, the perfect shape, with just the right amount of upward tilt offering perky, aroused tips.
“Oh, babe, you are so beautiful.”
He hesitated over whether it was more important to get his hands on her breasts or get her out of the rest of her clothes. He settled on doing both, taking his time to tease and caress, reacquainting himself with the hills and valleys of her that he found so thrilling to explore. He lifted her close enough to tongue her nipples—he loved the sound she made deep in her throat when he did that. Then he skimmed the
pink heart boxer shorts down her legs and tested her reaction to that same tongue on more intimate parts of her anatomy. The noises she made now were more like little yelps and he had to hold her pelvis still to get her the way he wanted.
Erica was now pulling at his clothes, too. His shirt was easy enough to dispense with, but his jeans wouldn’t come off over his work boots. Unwilling to take the time and trouble to free himself, he decided the best position for them was having her on top. However, the minute his bare butt touched the laundry room linoleum, he realized that it was damp and cold.
Tom got to his feet and picked up Erica, sitting her on the edge of the dryer and parting her legs in front of him. He thrust himself inside her all the way to the hilt.
Erica gasped.
Home! The word screamed so loudly in his own brain Tom was sure she must be able to hear it.
Deliberately he crawled back from the edge of the sexual precipice he teetered upon.
Take your time, he told himself. Make it last. Make it good. Make her scream. Get her there and then get yours. He repeated some version of this mantra several times. And the clothes dryer, warm and gently, rhythmically rocking, added a new and pleasurable element to the experience of laundry-room lovemaking.
Chapter 9
“I TRIED TO TELL HIM last night,” Erica confessed on the phone to her sister. “But the timing was bad.”
“When it’s bad news, the timing is always bad,” Letty pointed out.
“Well, it’s not all bad news,” Erica said. “I’ve already saved almost half of what I need for a new washer.”
“Yeah, and we know now that you’ll never be able to part with that dryer.”
Erica giggled. “You’re just jealous,” she teased. “But don’t worry, sis, someday you too will find a man who will have sex with you on laundry equipment.”
Erica was still laughing as she swiveled around in her chair. Standing in the opening of her cubicle was young Dr. Glover, the pharmacist whose name was so often linked with Callie Torreno.
