Part 3: Ninety Days
Lindy,
I’m writing this because I’m no good at saying things out loud. You know that. Every time I try to tell you something important, I get scared and make a joke.
So here it is. I’m putting it in the glove box because you always look in the glove box for the sunglasses. You’ll find it Saturday when we drive up to the lake for our anniversary. And then I’ll be standing right there, and I won’t be able to make a joke, because you’ll be reading it.
Ninety days, Lindy. Ninety days today. I haven’t had a drink since the Fourth of July. Since the night I scared you and Livvy. Since the night you said you’d take her and go to your sister’s if I didn’t stop.
I didn’t tell you I was going to meetings. I didn’t want to promise you something I couldn’t do. I’ve promised you a lot of things I couldn’t do. So I wanted to do it first. Then show you.
So here. Ninety days. In your hand.
There’s something else. I’ve been working nights. You know that. You think I’m drinking at the shop. I’m not. I swear on Livvy’s life, I’m not. I’m doing side jobs. Every one I can get. Every night. Because I’ve been saving.
There’s an envelope in the top drawer of my toolbox at the shop. The red one. Bottom left. It’s got eleven thousand four hundred dollars in it.
It’s for you. For us. I’m going to sell the garage. I’m going to go work for Delco at the plant. Regular hours. Benefits. A pension. Home every night at five. The kind of man you deserve. The kind of man your mother wanted you to marry.
I know you’ve been scared. I know I’m the thing you’ve been scared of. I’m going to stop being that.
I love you, Lindy. I loved you the first second I saw you at the county fair, buying that dumb horseshoe key ring. I’ll love you till I’m dead.
Ninety days. Then a hundred and eighty. Then a year. Then forever.
I promise.
Mike
P.S. Don’t let Livvy sit on the hood when the engine’s hot. She burned her leg last week and I never told you. I’m sorry about that too.
I stopped reading.
I couldn’t see anymore. The words were swimming.
The street was completely silent. A dog barked somewhere far away. A sprinkler hissed on a lawn across the street.
My mother sat in the passenger seat of my father’s car with the sobriety chip clutched in her fist against her chest. She wasn’t making a sound. Her eyes were closed. Tears ran down her face and dripped off her chin onto her pink bathrobe.
“He was sober,” she whispered.
“Mom—”
“He was sober. Ninety days. He died sober.” She opened her eyes. “Olivia, I thought he died drunk. Do you understand? For twenty-five years, I thought he was drinking at the shop that night. I thought that’s why his heart gave out. I thought he chose the bottle over us. Over you. Over me.” Her voice cracked into pieces. “And he was sober. He was working. He was saving money. For us. He was trying.”
She bent over in the seat. She pressed her forehead against the dashboard of my father’s car.
“The money,” she said into the dash. “The red envelope. In his toolbox. I sold his toolbox. To a pawn shop on Route 30. With all his tools in it. For six hundred dollars. I never opened the drawers. I never looked.”
She started sobbing. Great, heaving, ugly sobs. Twenty-five years of them.
“I never looked,” she kept saying. “I never looked. I never looked.”
I climbed into the car.
I don’t know how. I just did. I climbed into the back seat of my father’s Chevelle, behind my mother, and I reached forward between the seats and wrapped my arms around her from behind.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Mom. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I was so angry at him. For twenty-five years. I hated him. I told myself I hated him. I sold everything he ever touched. And I raised you to…” She gasped. “I raised you to be scared of men like him. And then you married one. And I’ve spent five years being cruel to the kindest man I’ve ever met. Because he reminded me of Mike. Because I thought Mike was a drunk who left me. And Mike was…”
She couldn’t finish.
“Mike was trying,” Ethan said softly.
He stood outside the open passenger door. He crouched down so he was eye level with her. He didn’t touch her. He just looked at her.
“He was trying, Linda,” Ethan said. “And he ran out of time. That’s all. He didn’t leave you. He ran out of time.”
My mother looked at him.
“How did you know?” she said. “How did you know to do this? To bring it back?”
Ethan was quiet for a moment.
“I didn’t know about the letter,” he said. “I swear to God. I found it in year two, and I put it back, and I didn’t read it. I didn’t know what was in it.”
“Then why? Why spend three years and every dollar you had on a car for a woman who called you ‘the mechanic’? Who gave you a job agency gift card for Christmas? Who skipped your housewarming and your shop opening and your closing?”
Ethan looked down at his hands. His rough, scarred, callused hands.
“Because I knew what it was like,” he said. “To lose something and never get it back.”
He told her then. Right there in the driveway. Crouched by the open door of my father’s car.
I’d heard it before. Bits and pieces. But never like this.
“My mom left when I was four,” he said. “I don’t remember her. Not really. Just a smell. Vanilla, maybe. And a song she used to sing. I don’t know the words. Just the tune.”
My mother watched him.
“I went into foster care,” Ethan said. “Seven houses. Seven families. Some of them were good. Most of them weren’t. Every time I moved, I lost something. A toy. A blanket. A picture. One family threw out all my stuff when I left because they said it smelled. I was nine.” He shrugged. “By the time I was sixteen, I had a duffel bag and the clothes I was wearing. That’s it. Nothing from before. Nothing from my mom. Nothing from anybody.”
“Ethan,” my mother whispered.
“When I was seventeen,” he said, “I got a job at a junkyard outside of town. And the old man who owned it, Mr. Haskell, he let me fix up a car. A beat-up ‘78 Monte Carlo. Took me two years. And when it was done, when I turned the key and it started for the first time, I sat in that car and I cried for an hour. Because it was mine. Because I’d made something come back from nothing. Because I’d taken something everybody else had given up on and made it run again.”
He looked at the Chevelle. At the gleaming blue paint. At the chrome.
“That’s what I do,” he said simply. “That’s all I know how to do. I find things people gave up on. And I bring them back.”
He looked at my mother.
“When you said bring back Mike’s car, I knew you didn’t mean it,” he said. “I knew you were drunk and angry and hurting. But I heard something else underneath it. I heard a woman who lost something and never got it back. Just like me.” He swallowed. “And I thought, maybe I can’t fix what happened to her. Maybe I can’t bring Mike back. But I can bring back his car. And maybe that’s something.”
My mother put her hand on his cheek.
She’d never touched Ethan before. Not once in five years. Not a handshake. Not a hug at Christmas. Nothing.
She put her hand on his cheek.
“It’s not something,” she said. “It’s everything.”
We sat in my mother’s kitchen for three hours.
She made coffee. She burned the first pot because her hands were shaking so badly she knocked the filter crooked. Ethan cleaned up the grounds and made a second pot without saying a word.
She sat at her granite kitchen island in her pink bathrobe, with the letter spread out in front of her and the sobriety chip in her hand. She read the letter eleven times. I counted.
She talked about my father.
She’d never talked about him. Not once in twenty-five years. Not really. Every time I asked, she’d change the subject or say, “That was a long time ago, Olivia.”
Now she couldn’t stop.
She told us about the county fair in 1988. How she’d been buying a four-dollar key ring at a booth, and a tall, skinny boy with grease on his hands had come up behind her and said, “That’s a lucky horseshoe. You should get two. One for me.” And she’d laughed at him and bought one, and gave it to him a year later on their first anniversary.
She told us about the night he finished rebuilding the Chevelle. 1995. How he’d honked the horn at two in the morning, and the whole neighborhood came out in their pajamas, and he’d driven her around the block twelve times with all the windows down, singing Bob Seger at the top of his lungs. All the wrong words.
She told us about the bad years. The drinking. The night of July Fourth, 2001. How he’d come home from a cookout so drunk he couldn’t stand, and he’d tripped over my tricycle in the driveway and fallen and cut his head open, and I’d seen it. I was seven. I’d screamed and screamed.
“You don’t remember that,” my mother said to me.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you don’t.”
She told us she’d packed a bag that night. For both of us. She’d put it by the front door. She told him she was leaving if he didn’t stop.
“And he stopped,” she whispered, looking at the chip. “He stopped. And he didn’t tell me. Because he didn’t want to promise me something he couldn’t do.”
She closed her hand around the chip.
“He was going to give me this on our anniversary,” she said. “At the lake. October sixth. We had reservations at a little cabin. I canceled them when he died. I never asked why he was so excited about that trip.”
Around noon, she put the letter down.
She looked at Ethan across the kitchen island.
“I owe you an apology,” she said.
“No, you don’t, Linda.”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “I do. And you’re going to let me give it, because I’m fifty-nine years old and I haven’t apologized to anybody since 1996, and if I don’t do it now, I’ll lose my nerve.”
Ethan closed his mouth.
My mother stood. She stood very straight, the way she stands at the front of a room when she’s presenting a house to a nervous buyer. Shoulders back. Chin up. In her pink bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.
“I’m sorry for what I said at your wedding,” she said. “I’m sorry for ‘the mechanic.’ I’m sorry for the gift card. I’m sorry for skipping the housewarming and the shop opening and the closing. I’m sorry for every single cruel thing I said or did for five years. I’m sorry for being too scared and too proud to see who you were.” Her voice wobbled. She steadied it. “You are the best thing that ever happened to my daughter. You are a good man. You are a better man than I deserved to have in my family.”
Ethan’s eyes were wet.
“And I’m sorry,” my mother said, “for saying she’s too good for you.”
She looked at me.
“She is good,” my mother said. “She’s the best person I know. But she’s not too good for you.” She looked back at Ethan. “Nobody is.”
Ethan stood.
He walked around the island. He stood in front of my mother.
“I have something else,” he said. “It was supposed to go in the package. But I chickened out.”
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans. He took out a little red envelope. With a bow.
My mother stared at it.
I knew that envelope. We all knew that envelope.
Ethan held it out to her.
She took it. She opened it. She pulled out the gift card inside.
PINNACLE STAFFING — $50.00 — Career Transition Consultation Services.
It was the same gift card. The Christmas gift card. From year three. He’d kept it.
But there was something else in the envelope now. A small white card. Ethan’s business card. REYES AUTO — HONEST WORK. On the back, in his blocky handwriting, he’d written:
Linda — I never needed a career transition. But I thought you might. Any time you want to learn how to drive a stick shift, the Chevelle’s got a four-speed. First lesson’s free. — E.
My mother stared at the card.
Then she started laughing. Really laughing. A big, surprised, unladylike laugh that I’d never heard come out of her in my entire life. She laughed so hard she had to grab the edge of the counter.
“A four-speed,” she gasped. “I can’t drive a four-speed. Mike tried to teach me in 1994. I stalled it eleven times in the Kroger parking lot. He laughed so hard he cried.”
“Well,” Ethan said, “I’ve got patience.”
My mother wiped her eyes.
“I know you do,” she said. “God knows you do. Five years of me, and you’re still standing here.”
She stepped forward.
And she hugged him.
My mother, Linda Carter, who never leaves the house without lipstick, put her arms around my husband in her pink bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and held on.
Ethan’s arms came up slowly around her. Like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
“Thank you,” she whispered into his flannel shirt. “Thank you for bringing him back.”
That afternoon, we went for a drive.
All three of us. In the Chevelle.
Ethan drove. My mother sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the back, the way I used to when I was little.
When Ethan turned the key, the engine roared to life. That deep, rumbling sound. Like a sleeping lion waking up.
I closed my eyes.
I was seven years old. I was sitting on the hood in the sun. My father stood next to me in his flannel shirt, singing the wrong words to a Bob Seger song.
I opened my eyes.
My mother was crying again. Quietly. Looking out the window.
“It sounds the same,” she said. “It sounds exactly the same.”
“I rebuilt the three ninety-six to factory spec,” Ethan said. “But I left one thing.”
“What?”
He reached over and turned on the radio. An old AM/FM. Original to the car.
“Mike had it set to 97.1,” Ethan said. “The classic rock station. I didn’t change it.”
The speakers crackled. And then, because sometimes the universe has a sense of humor, or maybe a sense of mercy, Bob Seger came on.
“Night Moves.”
My mother put her hand over her mouth.
She sang along. Quietly at first. Then louder. With all the wrong words. The same wrong words my father used to sing. Words I’d forgotten I knew.
I sang along too.
Ethan didn’t know the words at all. He just drove. With one hand on the wheel and one hand reaching back between the seats to hold mine.
We drove all the way to the lake. The same lake. My mother gave directions. Left at the old Sinclair station. Right at the church with the blue roof. Down a gravel road through the trees.
The little cabins were still there. Painted green now instead of brown. A new sign out front. But still there.
My mother made Ethan park the car by the water.
She got out. She walked down to the edge of the lake. She stood there in the October sun, looking out at the water. The leaves on the trees were red and gold and orange. The water was still and blue.
She took the sobriety chip out of her pocket.
She held it up to the light.
“Ninety days, Mike,” she said. “Then a hundred and eighty. Then a year. Then forever.”
She closed her hand around it.
“I got it,” she said. “Twenty-five years late. But I got it.”
