Send Down the Rain(55)

She lifted the door.

Inside, covered with a tan tarp, sat a car. Despite the fact that all four tires were flat and dry-rotted, I knew the body shape. I just couldn’t believe that what sat beneath the tarp might actually be what I thought it was. “Is that . . . ?”

She smiled that sneaky smile again and began pulling back the tarp.

I stood there. Jaw hanging. My ’67 Corvette. The one I’d given to Allie before I left. Now fifty years old. I didn’t know what to say. She reached in her pocket and slid the very same keys into my hand that I’d given her on the day I left. She looked at the car, then at me. “If you could ask these 550 horses what they’d prefer, they’d say, ‘Old man, turn on the juice and let us take you for a ride.’”

I stared at the keys. Nodding. The swell of emotion was more than I could hold back. She held my face in both her hands, leaned up on her toes, and kissed my cheek. Then my lips. Then again. If I thought I had loved her at one time, I had another thing coming. I looked down at her and wrapped my arms around her waist. “Allie-girl, you need to know something.”

“What’s that?”

“I have fallen for you. Totally.”

She kissed me. Tenderly. “Good.”

“Can you kiss me again?”

When she finished, she said, “You know, the whole kissing thing is great, but it gets better. Right? I mean, you do know that?”

I shook my head and opened the car door.

With four flat tires, we couldn’t push it. So we wiped off the seats, put the top down, and sat in the front seat. She propped her feet on the dash and we sang “Fortunate Son” and “American Pie,” and we held our imaginary glasses high toasting whiskey and rye.

A once-dead part of my heart came alive in that moment. It was pumping again. Feeling again. Listening to her sing, and watching her toe tap the dash, I felt my cold, gray heart turn warm and red.

That was both good and bad. Feeling something that good was a welcome emotion. But as I sat there singing with Allie, I felt the hair standing up on the back of my neck. A shadow over my shoulder.

If the good had returned, the bad wasn’t far behind.





32

With Allie’s encouragement, I took a break from the restaurant and got my hands greasy, spending a week with the Corvette. Between Port St. Joe, Tallahassee, and Apalachicola, I got the parts I needed to get her running. From day one, I had a helper. Diego. He was curious and possessed an innate understanding of how mechanical things worked. He helped me pull the engine, where we soaked her in an acid bath and started over. New rings. Gaskets. Plugs. Wires. Cables. Hoses.

Allie said she used to drive it once a month to keep it running, but that ended years ago. A decade maybe. So anything that could rot, had. Diego and I drained all the fluids; replaced the bearings, U-joints, and brake pads; turned the rotors; and bought a new set of Goodyears. If I needed a wrench, pan, rag, anything, Diego hopped up and got it for me. I explained everything I was doing to him, and pretty soon I was letting him do a few things himself.

After a day of elbow grease and buffing, the exterior color returned. Some of the chrome had rusted and bubbled slightly around the edges, but I couldn’t bring myself to replace it. The rag top was dingy and maybe on the verge of dry rot, but I looked at the canvas the same way I looked at the chrome. I just couldn’t bring myself to throw out something because it was old and no longer shiny.

With the soft opening less than a week away, I let Diego install the battery, and then we sat in the seats. I pushed in the clutch and let him turn the ignition. Cut from her cage, she roared to life. I revved the engine and sat there listening to the sound of my youth. Diego’s smile spread from ear to ear. I toweled the grease off my hands, pulled down my sunglasses, put the top down, and we eased out of the garage and cruised through town. On the outskirts I turned onto 30E, downshifted into second, revved it to 6,000 rpms, dropped the clutch, and burned rubber for an entire block.

I pulled up in front of the restaurant and sat there, engine idling. Allie came running out. She handed her apron to Diego. “Honey, tell your mom I’ll be back later.” She was a picture of the teenager I once knew. We put three hundred miles on the odometer before dark. With the sun falling west over the Gulf, we drove the coastline. Allie laid her head against the headrest, closed her eyes, and let the wind tug at her hair. I drove with my right hand and surfed the wind with my left. Dark found us parked facing the beach, moon above us, stars shining down, Allie leaning against me. Neither of us saying a word. Soaking in what had long since drained out.

After an hour of sitting in each other’s quiet, she turned and looked up at me. “How long have we been back in each other’s lives?”

“Couple of months.”

She shook her head. “Four months. Seven days. Two hours.”

I smiled. Not sure where this was going. “Okay.”

She placed her hand on my chest. “And in all that time, why haven’t you made a pass at me?”

That was a good question. The answer was not. I was about to say something when she said, “I mean, I’ve made like a hundred passes at you, which have done me little good, so I’m just wondering if you’ve lost your mojo.”

“My mojo?”

She laughed. “Yes. Mojo.”

I stammered, “I was thinking we’d get there when we got there. You just lost one husband and I thought . . .”