I read that spiral notebook standing up, in the dark half of a barn, for the better part of an hour, and I did not sit down once because there was nothing in there to sit on and because after about page four I wasn’t thinking about my legs.
Walt Dempsey was a mechanic. Thirty-eight years at a shop on East Cerro Gordo that closed in 2006, and in all the time he lived next door to me he never told me that, and I never asked, and I have had to make my peace with that.
The three cars under those tarps were not his.
He bought every one of them off a family in a bad year. That’s what the logbook is. Not a restoration log — a ledger of promises. Date bought, price paid, who he paid, why they needed it, and then underneath, in the same careful hand, every single thing he ever did to that car. Oil in the cylinders. Battery out. Fuel drained. Bearings turned by hand a quarter turn, twice a year, for decades.
The 1969 Camaro belonged to a boy named Tyrell Suggs who went into the Army in 1990 and came back different and needed money in 1993 for reasons the logbook records in one flat sentence. Walt gave him four thousand dollars for a car worth eleven hundred at the time.
The pickup was a widow’s on Fairview Avenue in 1998.
The third one was a 1970 Chevelle, dark green, and I knew that car before I got the tarp all the way off it, and I sat down on the concrete right there.
My father sold that car in the winter of 1991 to pay for my mother’s surgery. I was nine. I remember him standing in our driveway watching a man drive it away and I remember he did not come inside for a long while.
The man who drove it away was Walt Dempsey. He paid nine thousand dollars for it, which was more than double, and my father never knew who he was because it was done through a fellow at the shop on purpose.
And then in 2004 Walt bought the house next door to us. He lived sixteen years thirty feet from my father’s kitchen window and never said one word about it.
The last page of that notebook has one entry that isn’t about a car:
“Give them the chance to want it back. Do not give it to them as a gift or as a lesson. Sell it back for what I paid and not one dollar more, and if they say no, sell it to a stranger and never tell them the difference.”
He never once offered. Not to Tyrell, not to the widow, not to my father. He kept them running and he waited to be asked and nobody ever asked because nobody ever knew.
Tyrell Suggs is fifty-six and lives in Springfield. He came and got that Camaro in October on a trailer he borrowed. He paid the four thousand. He would not hear another word about it.
The pickup went back to the widow’s grandson.
My father is seventy-nine. I did not tell him what I’d found. I drove that Chevelle to his house on a Sunday in June, running, on its own tires, and pulled it into his driveway and sat in it with the window down.
He came out on the porch in his slippers and he stood there and he could not get one word out of his mouth for about a minute and a half.
Then he said, “That’s the wrong plate.”
He drives it to the diner on Saturdays now. He is a terrible driver and he loves that car and I have quit worrying about it.
Sixteen years the man waved at us when he got his mail.