As I dial the number on my clipboard, my heart starts to race and my palms sweat.
“Yeah?” he answers, and there are voices in the background, like he’s in a park or something.
“Um, is this Rafael Guerrera?”
“Hello, Colin.”
“Hey, uh, just wanted to let you know your car’s all set. No leak. Just needed an oil change. We’re open till two if you want to come get it.”
The sound on Rafael’s side of the phone gets a little muted, like he covered it, and I hear sharp words in Spanish.
“Two, huh? I don’t think I’ll be able to get there before you close. Are you open tomorrow?”
“Nope. Monday, eight thirty to six.”
“Monday, then. Thank you, Colin.” The noise on his end crescendos to a crash that cuts off the call, and I’m surprised to find that I’m a little… disappointed?
Sam, my older brother, spends Saturdays in the office getting us caught up on paperwork, but Pop and Brian come out of the house around ten, when the usual Saturday stream of quick fixes begins. Oil changes, tire rotations, flats, busted windshields. Saturdays are dull but they always move fast. Hell, even Brian can hold his own with most Saturday issues.
“Maybe we should paint,” Pop muses over a beer after we close.
“The garage?” I ask. It’s been the same yellowish-tan since I can remember.
“The outside of the shop,” Pop says. “Maybe brighten the place up a little.”
Every few years Pop undertakes some scheme to try and make the shop more successful, and every few years he leaves it uncompleted. We have some clients that Pop brought over from his last job when he opened this place. They’re loyal and they don’t give a crap what color the outside of the shop is. There are the neighborhood clients who come to us because we’re the closest garage. Some come back, some don’t, but it’s a steady stream. It’s clear who Pop is hoping to entice with a scheme to “brighten the place up,” then: the twenty- and thirtysomething hipsters who’ve swarmed to the neighborhood in the last ten years. Daniel always called them gentrifiers, whatever that means. They look just like him.
“Sure. What’re you thinking?”
“Shit, I dunno. What’s popular these days?”
“Um.” I’m not really the right one to ask. “There’s a new place—opened at, uh, 22nd and Washington. Kermit’s. It’s cakes and pizza.” Xavier dragged me there once. Said he wanted to check out their cupcakes for Angela’s birthday. They had a bunch of fancy flavors that he thought she’d love.
“The outside of it’s cool—it’s like an old-school tattoo of pink roses and black vines. Kinda like—”
“Pink roses?” Pop grunts. “Sounds faggy. I don’t want flowers on the outside of my shop.”
Shame curls up from my stomach like a snake. “Right. I didn’t mean—I just meant, the style—”
“Psh,” he snorts. “Never mind. Maybe a new sign.”
“Yeah, sure. Sounds good. You want me to look into it?”
He pats me on the back and pulls himself up to get another beer.
“Yeah. Thanks, kid.” He runs his rough hand over my buzzed hair. “You do a good job, Colin. A real good job.”
I can’t remember the last time Pop has touched me that wasn’t to slap me on the back or push me out of his way. Usually he acts like it’s his due to have us working in the shop, carrying out his plans, playing by his rules. His compliments come irregularly, and always just at the moment I’m almost fed up with him.
The joy of his approval burns away the shame, and I feel lighter than I have in months. I remember this feeling from when I was a kid. Pop would muck around with friends’ cars in what was then our garage, pointing and asking us what was wrong with them, how to fix them. As the oldest, Sam was quickest, for a while. He had a good memory and could always repeat back ways of fixing things that Pop had explained. Brian didn’t really try, just wanted to play the game because the rest of us were. Daniel was better, even as the youngest, and he could make leaps of logic that Sam couldn’t. That was before Daniel lost all interest in cars, and in us.
I was the best, though. I could remember things like Sam and come up with creative solutions like Daniel. I cared the most, too. I wanted to be just like Pop and bring cars back to life. A few years later, when Pop opened his own shop, expanding our garage into the empty lot next door, I spent almost all my free time there, watching Pop and the men who worked with him, learning everything I could. And every time he nodded at me, clapped me on the back, or grunted at me to go ahead with the repair I’d laid out, I felt it. That warm, fizzy feeling.