Epilogue: I Give It Forever
That was a year ago.
My mother kept the Chevelle. Of course she did.
She keeps it in her two-car garage now. The white Lexus sits in the driveway. The Chevelle gets the garage.
She learned to drive a four-speed. It took Ethan eleven lessons. She stalled it in the Kroger parking lot thirty-four times. He never once lost his patience. On the twelfth lesson, she made it all the way around the parking lot without stalling, and she honked the horn and screamed out the window like a teenager.
She drives it every Sunday. To church. Then to lunch. Then to the cemetery.
She parks it right next to my father’s grave. She sits on the hood. In the sun.
She told me she talks to him. She tells him about her week. About the houses she sold. About me. About Ethan.
“I tell him,” she said once, “that our daughter married a mechanic. And that he’s the best man I’ve ever known. And I tell Mike he’d have liked him. They’d have spent every Saturday in the garage together arguing about carburetors.”
My mother comes to everything now.
She came to Ethan’s birthday. She came to the shop’s fifth anniversary party and gave a toast in the parking lot, standing on an overturned bucket, holding a can of Coke.
“To Reyes Auto,” she said. “Honest work. And honest men.”
Everybody cheered. Ethan’s crew lifted her off the bucket and carried her around the parking lot on their shoulders while she screamed and laughed and told them to put her down.
She calls him Ethan now. Never “the mechanic.” Except once, at Thanksgiving, when she asked him to fix her garbage disposal.
“Can the mechanic take a look at this?” she said, grinning.
“The mechanic charges double on holidays,” Ethan said.
“The mechanic can put it on my tab.”
She has a tab at the shop now. Ethan fixes her Lexus. She pays full price. She insists on it.
“You’re not doing it for free,” she says. “Mike never charged enough either. Look where it got him.”
She says it lightly now. Like a joke. But I know what’s underneath it.
She found the red envelope.
Well. Ethan did.
After the drive to the lake, he went down to the pawn shop on Route 30. The one where my mother sold my father’s toolbox in 2001. It was still there. Different owners. But the old man who used to run it, Mr. Petrakis, was still alive, ninety-one years old, living in the apartment upstairs.
Ethan asked him about a red Snap-on toolbox. Sold in October 2001.
Mr. Petrakis remembered it. He remembered everything. He’d bought it himself. He’d kept it for twenty years in his own garage because it was “too pretty to sell.” And when he retired, he’d given it to his nephew.
His nephew still had it.
The drawers had never been opened. The nephew said the bottom left drawer had always been stuck. He thought it was broken.
Ethan opened it with a screwdriver.
Inside was a red envelope. Faded to pink. With LINDY written on the front in messy blue ballpoint.
Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. In twenties and fifties. Twenty-five years old.
My mother didn’t spend it.
She gave it to me.
“For the baby,” she said.
Did I mention the baby?
I’m six months pregnant. A boy. Due in January.
We’re naming him Michael.
My mother cried for two hours when we told her. Then she went out to her garage and sat in the Chevelle and cried for two more.
Then she went to Babies R Us and bought a car seat. The most expensive one they had. She had Ethan come over and install it in the back of the Chevelle.
“Mom,” I said. “You can’t put a baby in a 1969 Chevelle. It doesn’t have the right seatbelts.”
“Then the mechanic,” my mother said, “will install the right seatbelts.”
Ethan installed the right seatbelts.
Today is our sixth anniversary.
We’re having a little party. Just family and close friends. In our backyard on Maple Lane, under the big oak tree. Paper lanterns. A cheese plate. Twenty people.
My mother came early. She brought a cake. A real one. From a bakery. White, with blue frosting the exact color of Fathom Blue. On top, in white icing letters, it says:
HAPPY 6TH ANNIVERSARY, OLIVIA & ETHAN.
And underneath, in smaller letters:
I GIVE IT FOREVER.
She stood at the end of dinner. She tapped her wine glass with a fork. Everybody turned to look at her.
I held my breath. I couldn’t help it. Old habits.
My mother raised her glass.
“Six years ago,” she said, “I stood up at my daughter’s wedding and gave the worst toast in the history of toasts.”
Everybody laughed. The good kind of laughing.
“I said I gave it a year,” my mother said. “I said Ethan wasn’t good enough. I was wrong. I was so wrong I don’t even have the words for how wrong I was.” She looked at Ethan. “I was wrong about you. I was wrong about mechanics. I was wrong about a lot of things. Most of all, I was wrong about my husband. And it took the man I was cruelest to, to show me.”
She took a breath.
“Mike used to say the best engines are the ones somebody gave up on,” she said. “Because when you bring them back, they run better than they ever did before. Because somebody cared enough to take them apart and look at every piece.”
She raised her glass higher.
“To Olivia and Ethan,” she said. “And to everything that comes back. I give it forever.”
Everybody drank.
Ethan stood. He raised his glass toward my mother.
And he smiled at her. The same smile from six years ago. Calm. Steady. A man who’d been hit before and knew how to take it.
But this time, there was something else in it too. Something softer.
“Thank you, Linda,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”
My mother laughed. She laughed so hard she had to sit down.
Later that night, after everybody went home, I found my mother in our detached garage.
She stood next to the Chevelle. She’d driven it over. It was parked inside, under the lights, gleaming blue. Ethan’s tools hung on the pegboard on the wall. His workbench was covered with half-finished projects.
She was running her hand along the hood. Slowly. The way you’d stroke a horse.
“You okay, Mom?”
She turned around. She smiled.
“I’m good,” she said. “I’m really good.”
She looked at the car for a long moment.
“Can I tell you something?” she said.
“Of course.”
“I’ve been thinking about why I was so cruel to him,” she said. “All those years. Ethan. I thought it was because he reminded me of your father. Because I was scared you’d end up like me. Alone. With nothing.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Part of it,” she said. “But not all of it.” She was quiet for a moment. “I think I was jealous.”
“Of what?”
“Of you,” she said softly. “Because you got to have what I lost. A good man with grease under his nails who loved you more than anything. And I was so angry that I didn’t get to keep mine. I was so angry that I didn’t get to finish the story. So I tried to ruin yours.”
I didn’t know what to say.
My mother turned back to the car. She put both her hands flat on the hood.
“But he finished it for me,” she said. “Ethan. He found the last chapter. The one I didn’t know was there. The one in the glove box.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were wet. But she was smiling.
“Mike was trying,” she said. “I always thought he gave up. And the whole time, he was trying.”
“I know, Mom.”
“And Ethan was trying too. The whole time I was cruel to him. Every Christmas. Every insult. He was in that garage every night, bringing your father back.” She shook her head slowly. “Two good men. Trying. And I couldn’t see either one of them.”
“You see them now,” I said.
“I see them now,” she agreed.
She reached into the pocket of her coat.
She took out the sobriety chip. 90 DAYS. Bronze. A little worn now. She carries it everywhere.
She held it out to me.
“For Michael,” she said. “When he’s old enough. I want him to have it.”
“Mom, that’s yours.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I want him to have it. I want him to know his grandfather was trying. I want him to know that sometimes the people we love are fighting battles we never see. And that the worst thing you can do is decide you know how the story ends before you’ve read the last page.”
She closed my fingers around the chip.
“And I want him to know,” she said, “that his father is a man who brings things back. Things everybody else gave up on. Cars. People.” She smiled. “Grandmothers.”
I held the chip tight in my fist.
I couldn’t speak.
My mother left around eleven.
Ethan and I stood on the front porch and watched her go. She backed the Chevelle down the driveway slowly. She only stalled once.
At the bottom of the driveway, she rolled down the window.
“Same time next Sunday?” she called.
“Same time next Sunday,” Ethan called back.
She honked the horn twice. Then she drove off down Maple Lane, the engine rumbling, taillights glowing red in the dark.
Through the open window, faintly, I could hear the radio.
97.1. Bob Seger.
And my mother, singing along.
With all the wrong words.
Ethan put his arm around me. I leaned against him. The baby kicked.
“You knew,” I said. “Didn’t you? Back at the wedding. When she said she gave it a year. You knew she didn’t mean it.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I knew she was hurting,” he said. “That’s all. When people say something that cruel, it’s almost never about you. It’s about something they lost.”
“How do you always know that?”
He shrugged.
“I’m a mechanic,” he said. “When something makes a terrible noise, you don’t get mad at it. You don’t kick it. You don’t give up on it.” He kissed the top of my head. “You open the hood. And you look for what’s broken.”
I stood there in the dark on our front porch, with my husband’s arm around me and my son kicking inside me and my father’s sobriety chip in my fist.
Six years ago, my mother gave us a year.
She was wrong.
But she was also right about one thing, though she didn’t know it at the time.
Ethan was too good for us. Too good for her. Too good for me. Too good for a family that couldn’t see past grease-stained hands to the heart underneath.
He just never once let us know it.
He just kept working. Every night. Every weekend. Every spare dollar in a coffee can.
Bringing back the things we’d all given up on.
Until we were whole again.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
