Don't Fail Me Now(53)

I stare out at the mountain, a big, squat pile of rock rising out of the valley like a sloppy sandcastle. I bet I could break it with my rage right now, just bust through like a bullet and send it crumbling into pebbles. Thanks, Buck, I think. Thanks for everything, you piece-of-shit excuse for a human being. Thanks for giving me your eyes so I can see so clearly the ruins you left for us. Thanks for robbing us of our childhoods. Thanks for robbing us of our sister. Thanks for setting Mom on a collision course and then leaving us to pick up the pieces.

“By the time I found out he was lying,” Leah continues, “I was too scared to look for you. Because I thought you didn’t want to find me.” She swallows hard, blinking back tears. “Or else you would have.”

“We did want you,” I say, grabbing her hand. “We always wondered about you. We just didn’t know your name. We used to make up stories, and we would just call you Sister.”

“Really?” A shadow of a smile. “What were they?”

“Usually we’d get reunited and then go kick some bad guys’ asses,” I say.

“So, this trip, basically?” she says, and we both laugh. Leah’s a lot sharper than I first gave her credit for. “I made my mom make up stories about you guys, too,” she says, shaking her head. “That must have been so weird for her.”

“What were we like?” I ask.

“Um . . . usually princesses,” she says with a smirk. “You would come in this big fancy coach and tell me I was your sister and I could come live in the palace with you. Like Cinderella, basically. I watched a lot of Disney.”

“Believe me,” I laugh, “you don’t want to live in our palace. We’d rather move into yours.”

“I’m sorry about your mom,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d do if my mom was in jail.”

“You’d survive,” I say.

“Maybe,” she says, looking unconvinced.

“Besides, you have Tim,” I say.

“He’s pretty great,” she says. “I mean, he can be annoying, but I’m just glad I’m not an only child anymore.” I know she’s talking about Tim, but she looks at me when she says it.

“Yeah.”

“He likes you, you know.”

I’m caught off guard by the change in subject. “What? No.” I reach down and rip up my own handful of grass, feeling the blush rise in my cheeks.

“He does,” she says. “He’s got no poker face. And that song last night, I mean, come on.” She rolls her eyes. “He is so obvious about everything. It’s embarrassing.”

“Well, he made some money, at least. Which reminds me”—I glance back at Goldie, slumping as unimpressively as ever in the early morning light—“I still have to show him up.”

“What are you planning?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you if you help me,” I say with a grin.

? ? ?

We open the trunk as quietly as possible and grab indiscriminately at bags, pulling them out onto the grass. In addition to a few pairs of seemingly clean underpants, a roll of paper towels, a circa-1992 Aerosmith cassette tape, and a crumpled pack of cigarettes, we find a socket wrench, a small pair of pliers, a weird diamond-shaped hunk of metal that neither of us can identify, and—most amazingly—a beat-up copy of Auto Repair for Dummies, which at first makes us high-five but then brings a wave of guilt as I picture my mother doing the same thing I’m doing right now—paging through it while her children slept, searching desperately for some key word she understood, hoping she could pull it off. Maybe Mom’s the only reason Goldie’s made it this far, no matter how bad she looks. Maybe she’s been doing a lot more good I can’t see.

“I think checking the wheel bearings means we have to take the wheels off,” Leah says, pointing to a diagram of a confounding tower of tiny plates and screws.

“Okay, let’s check the heat riser and exhaust pipe first.” I prop open the hood, and we stare for a while at the jumble of dull tubes and cylinders connected by crisscrossed wires. I can identify the engine and the battery and that’s about it, but luckily the book really does seem to be written for stupid people, so finding the little metal plate in the diagram isn’t too hard. While Leah reads aloud from the manual, I poke around and try to wiggle it with my fingers, but it’s so rusty that it seems glued in place permanently; it doesn’t budge. So much for that.

Checking the actual exhaust pipe requires more work, since it’s under the car. We can’t jack it, but I can fit my head and shoulders underneath without feeling like I’m inviting death, and after some experimentation we discover that if Leah holds her compact mirror at the right angle, she can catch enough light so that I can see. I trace the loose pipe with my fingers, dirt clumps falling into my eyes and hair, until I come to a bigger piece of metal covering part of the pipe. It gives immediately when I touch it, and when I shake it I can hear rocks or something rattling around inside.

“I found it!” I cry triumphantly. I would raise my arms Rocky-style if I wasn’t worried about accidentally amputating a finger. I shimmy back out to wipe my face and get some tools to find Tim standing next to Leah, looking down at us sleepy and confused.

“What are you doing?” he asks.