Chapter 3: The First Morning
It was a Tuesday in October when Mike opened the garage door at seven-fifteen and found the red Porsche sitting across his apron like a bar across a doorway. It was parked — though parked is a generous word for what it was doing — squarely in the middle of the concrete, nose toward the street, close enough to the garage door that the door, rising, cleared its spoiler by perhaps four inches. Behind it, Mike could not have gotten a bicycle out, let alone Mrs. Lindqvist's Buick, which was due at eight with a water pump that had been singing since Labor Day.
He stood in the doorway with his coffee and considered the situation the way he considered any engine problem: as a thing with a cause. Cars did not park themselves. Someone had left this car here, late at night or early in the morning, and the someone was not a mystery. The fitted cover was off. The dew was on the windshield. A paper coffee cup from the place on Henderson Road stood on the roof, forgotten, in the manner of a flag planted on conquered territory.
Mike was not, by nature or by business model, a man who started feuds. He had unclogged the Harringtons' garbage disposal once, on a Sunday, and refused payment. So he did what a reasonable man does on a quiet street: he went into the kitchen, found one of Sarah's index cards — the good ones, from the recipe box — and wrote, in his careful mechanic's printing, a note. Morning — this is the work driveway for Callahan Auto Care, and I have customers in and out all day starting at eight. No hard feelings at all, but I need it clear. Thanks very much — Mike, four doors down. He walked out in the cold morning in his work boots and put the card under the Porsche's windshield wiper, centered, where a person climbing into the driver's seat could not possibly miss it.
Then he called Mrs. Lindqvist and performed the small humiliation of the morning, explaining that her eight o'clock was now a noon, and she was gracious in the way of a woman who has raised four children and buried a husband and cannot be rattled by a water pump, and he spent the morning doing the jobs that didn't need the lift — a battery, two inspections, a brake light — while the red car sat in his apron with the dew drying off it in patches, in no hurry whatsoever, like a cat in a sunbeam that somebody else is paying for.
The Porsche left at ten-forty. Mike was under a hood at the time and heard it more than saw it: the door, the long theatrical idle, the exhaust clearing its throat all the way down Maple Court. He did not see who drove it. He did not see anyone read a note. He finished the battery job, swept the apron with unnecessary thoroughness, and told himself, with the optimism of a man who has fixed ten thousand machines and believes most problems are adjustments, that it was handled. A note, a neighbor, a misunderstanding: these were the moving parts of suburban life, and they generally resolved themselves by Friday.
At noon the Buick came, right on time, and he did the water pump the hard way, at the curb, on his old creeper with the front wheels chocked and the October sun working on the back of his neck. It was good work, done well, in the wrong place. When he stood up at two with his knees complaining and looked at his garage standing empty behind its closed door, he felt something he had not felt in twelve years of self-employment: locked out of his own life by somebody else's convenience. In the appointment book, in the margin beside the day's printed date, he wrote in blunt pencil: Porsche. Apron. Note left. He underlined it once, the way a man marks a sound he intends to understand.
Sarah, when she got home, asked how the day had gone, and he told her about the noon Buick and the moved morning, and she stood in the garage doorway looking at the empty apron with her arms folded in the posture she used for children who were lying about stomachaches.
"Did you talk to him?" she said.
"I left a note," Mike said. "A nice note. Index card. Centered."
"Mike."
"It'll be fine," he said, and because he wanted it to be true, he almost believed it. He set his tools in their places, smallest to largest, the way he ended every day, and he did not think about the red car again until the next morning at seven-fifteen, when he raised the garage door on the same red shape, parked in the same place, if anything a little more precisely centered than before, like a picture hung by someone making a point.