The Car She Crushed: What the Old Wreck Was Worth

Chapter 2: The Ten Years

My father bought the Meridian in the spring of 1978, from a man in Indiana who had backed it into a grain auger and then, in the way of men who cannot stand to look at their mistakes, let it sit under a carport for six years. Frank Mercer paid four hundred dollars and a used lathe for it. My mother said it was the most expensive piece of garbage to occupy our driveway. My father, who was a machinist and therefore constitutionally incapable of seeing a broken machine as anything but an unfinished sentence, said, "It's all there, Ruth. It just isn't together."

I was twelve the first winter we worked on it, which means my job was holding the flashlight. Anyone who has held a flashlight for a machinist father knows it is a job with one rule — the light goes where the work is, not where your curiosity is at any given moment — and a failure rate of one hundred percent in the first year. He never yelled. He would say, "Daniel, the bolt doesn't care where you're looking," and I would move the light, and gradually I learned the thing he was teaching, which had little to do with flashlights: attention is a form of respect, and patience is a form of accuracy.

The restoration took ten years of weekends. I want to be precise about that, because people hear "restored a car" and picture a montage. There was no montage. There were winters in an unheated garage with a kerosene stove that made the air taste of pennies. There was the engine coming out twice, the second time because my father found a hairline flaw in a part he had certified good and would not let stand. There was the paint — Meridian called it Halcyon Blue, a color specific enough that matching it took eleven months and a paint chemist in Toledo who guarded the formula like a state secret and surrendered it for a case of my mother's preserves and my father's word that it would only ever go on this one car.

There was the steering wheel. The Meridian GT's wheel was a one-year-only part, walnut rim, cast hub, and ours had been split in the auger incident. We searched four years. My father found one in a barn outside Des Moines, drove eleven hours each way, and paid the man in cash and a rebuilt carburetor. He put the wheel in the passenger seat for the drive home like it was a person. I was sixteen. I understood completely.

By the time I was twenty-two, the car was whole. Not new — my father had opinions about men who restore a car into something it never was — but whole: every number matching, every panel honest, the engine turning over with that considering rumble that made my mother come to the kitchen door the first time, wiping her hands, smiling despite herself. We took it to a show that fall and came home with a trophy my father accepted with embarrassment and kept on the workbench, where it gathered the same dust as everything else he valued.

He drove it twice a year, maybe three times. That was never the point and we both knew it. The point was the ten years. The point was a twelve-year-old learning to hold the light still.

Frank Mercer died two years ago in February, in his sleep, in the house he and my mother had kept for fifty years, eleven days after a doctor used the word "heart" in the tone doctors use when the sentence is finished. Ana handled the estate with the clean efficiency of a woman who grieves by organizing. The car came to me because there was no question, and because I had the garage, and because some paperwork is just love with signatures.

I keep it the way he kept it. The cover comes off on the first dry Saturday of spring and the last dry Saturday of fall, and I check the fluids and the tires and the seams, and I talk to it, which I am aware is a thing a man in my profession should not put in writing. I tell it about cases I can describe and cases I can't. I tell it the lane news. Twice a year I drive it around the county at dawn, when the roads are empty, and the Halcyon Blue goes black in that light, and for twenty minutes the world is as wide as a father, a son, and a machine they built out of weekends.

Then I put it back under its cover, run my thumb along the seam, and lock the garage. Most of my life is documentation. The car is the one thing I never documented. I believed — and I record this belief because it is the most expensive one I have ever held — that some things are safe because everyone can see you don't make a fuss about them.