What He's Been Missing

He’d just gotten his driver’s license and his father gave him his old rusty red Ford that had been sitting in their backyard since forever. But Chauncey fixed it up and got it on the road. One day, he drove up to my house and didn’t come up on the stoop, but he honked the horn and said, “Hey, little gal, you wanna ride?” Shit, I was in that car faster than a fly. We went everywhere. And soon we were secret boyfriend and girlfriend. He took my virginity in the front seat, and I didn’t know anything about birth control, so I got pregnant. I also didn’t know anything about being pregnant, so I didn’t know what was going on until I was sitting in church between my father and Grammy Annie-Lou and saw red everywhere on my dress. Grammy Annie-Lou dragged me to the bathroom thinking it was my period, but I wouldn’t stop bleeding. The blood was everywhere. Soon the bathroom was filled with women. Mama Billups, too. They didn’t tell me what was going on. They had me stand over the top of the toilet with my legs wide apart. I remember that Grammy Annie-Lou didn’t look worried anymore. She looked afraid. They all did. When we walked outside the bathroom on our way to my father’s car, he was standing right at the door. “Who done this to you?” he demanded. “You tell your father!” Grammy Annie-Lou pushed him back. “Leave her alone, Robert. Now is not the time. We’ve got to get this girl to the hospital. Move back!” She pushed again and the women made a circle around me.

The next morning, I woke up in my bed with a bedpan on the nightstand. At the hospital, the doctor had said I’d had a misscar-riage. Grammy Annie-Lou was asleep in a chair beside the bed. I heard my father’s voice out front on the porch. He wasn’t yelling, but I could hear his anger. I limped—for no reason other than that I thought I should—to the window. Chauncey was standing at the foot of the steps. My father was at the top. The old red Ford was parked in the dirt road in front of the steps. I pressed my ear to the window so I could hear. “You took my best thing from me. The only thing I have that’s worth anything. The only thing I love,” my father said. “A man can’t take something from another man without paying for it.” Chauncey didn’t respond. I looked to see him stand straighter. “You ruined my girl,” my father said. “What are you going to do?” Chauncey looked at me in the window. “You look at me, son,” my father said. “My daughter ain’t about to be no one’s good-time gal, so you can take your eyes off her. After high school, she’s going off to college. She’s too smart to be around here with you. But there’s still the matter of what you owe me.” Chauncey’s eyes left me. He looked down at his pocket. He slid his right hand into his right pocket and pulled out the keys to the Ford. He threw them to my father and that was that. Chauncey obeyed the old-school code and never spoke to me again. My father parked the pickup behind Grammy Annie-Lou’s house and never once moved it. Grass and wild onions grew high up under the hood and soon it seemed to be eaten alive by the earth. Our old dog, King, the world’s only fat German Shepard, slept under the bed in back.

At my father’s funeral last year, Grammy Annie-Lou handed me a piece of folded-up napkin paper. My father had written his will in blue ink on the inside. He owned three things and gave them all to me: a set of tools, King, and the old red Ford. I left the tools and King in Social Circle, but a few months ago, I had the truck hauled to Atlanta with dreams of fixing it up and maybe even giving it back to Chauncey. My father’s words were spoken in sadness and tradition and no pickup could ever make up for what that experience did to me . . . to all three of us. And it wasn’t all Chauncey’s fault. I think my father realized both of those things at some point. But he couldn’t return the truck. And Chauncey wouldn’t have taken it anyway, back then.

For the last three months, Bird, the owner of the West End auto body shop where the tow truck driver suggested I deliver the Ford, had been working on it, rebuilding everything under that hood that had rotted during all that time out in the yard, making big plans for the red candy paint exterior and bigger plans for the white leather seats and sound system.

“Gonna need to send off for those valves. Can’t use what they got at the store. New stuff is crap. Can’t put new stuff on an old thing,” Bird said, after explaining a list of problems he was having with the engine he’d just finished rebuilding. As usual, the point of the speech was that he needed more parts and more time and more money. He was so particular about everything with the truck, excited about getting it back to its original condition with its original parts.

“And how much are these valves and such going to cost me?” I asked Bird. We were standing in front of the truck in the shop’s garage. He’d just finished rolling out from underneath the hood and had some kind of black oil zigzagging down his forehead. He wasn’t in shape but had the arms of a man who lifted many heavy things. Looking at him, it was hard not to imagine what those things might be—if maybe I could be one. Maybe it was the tattoos all over his arms. Or his tight T-shirts that showed every mark of hard work on his chest. The seemingly endless reserve of sweat that glistened over his arms whenever I saw him.

“How much you got, Miss Lady?” Bird leaned against the hood and crossed his legs. When he moved like that, it reminded me of Chauncey and the country-boy flirtation he’d used to get me into that truck. Bird tried the same thing. Every week when I stopped by Bird’s Auto on Tuesday during my lunch break, he’d lean against the truck with his two gold chains hanging from his neck and ask me out. I wasn’t fool enough to fall for his advances. It wasn’t anything to take to heart. He was a “cat caller,” meaning he’d make a call at any cat . . . any cat.

“Depends on how much you need,” I said, matching his tone. It was just our play.

“All that money you got,” he said, looking me over from heel to head, “ain’t nothing to you. What you got, a million in the bank?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s not truck-fixing money either way.”

“Hum . . .” Bird reached out and pinched my elbow. “When you gonna let me take you out, Miss Lady? You so pretty.”

“Come on. You ask me that every week.”

“And every week you turn me down.”

“So why do you keep asking?”

“ ’Cause you keep coming back.” Bird pinched my elbow again and wiped the last little trickle of grease from his forehead with his elbow. “Real question is, why you keep saying no?”

“Because, Mr. Bird, I don’t mix business with pleasure. And I’m a woman of my word.”

Bird chuckled and went inside to get a printout of my invoice from his receptionist. I chuckled, too, and turned to get a look at my real car waiting in the parking lot outside the garage. Ian had just pulled up beside it and was stepping out of his car.

“Ian? What are you doing here?” I looked at my watch. “Is it Wednesday?”

“No, it’s not Wednesday,” he said, stopping in front of me. “Just wanted to see you. Stopped by the office and Krista said you were over here in the hood.” He looked over my shoulder at the truck. “Man, I can’t believe you’re really fixing that old thing up. I thought you were joking.”

“No, I was serious. I’ll be on the road in no time.”

“Yeah, sitting on the side of the road while you call AAA to come pick you up,” he said with a smirk. Ian lectured on Tuesdays, so he was wearing his standard young professor attire: a shirt and tie with a thick retro cardigan with leather patches on the sleeves; jeans; and a paperboy hat. Last year, one of his students took a picture of him lecturing and e-mailed it to a local newspaper that deemed Ian the “sexiest professor in Atlanta” in a special edition of the newspaper. Ian pretended that he hated the idea, but that didn’t stop him from collecting at least ten copies and stashing them in his office.

“Very nice, Mr. I Need a New Car Every Year,” I teased.

“You’re damn skippy! I work too hard dealing with these bad-ass college students to be driving around in something old. I’ll take riding in luxury from here to there, please. What, the black man can’t have new things?”

“Nothing wrong with old thi

ngs,” Bird said, appearing from behind me with the invoice in hand. “You know what they say about old cars? When the world comes to an end—you know, we drop them bombs on one another and we’re all burned to smithereens—two things will be left: roaches and old cars. Built tough.” Bird knocked on the hood of the Ford and then extended his hand to Ian. The oil and cuts and whatever on his hand were the perfect contrast to Ian’s paws that had hardly managed any upsets aside from a paper cut while grading essays. “I’m Bird, this beautiful lady’s mechanic.”

“I’m Ian—this crazy lady’s friend.” Ian tightened his jawline. I guessed he was trying to seem bigger.

“Ian? The brother who’s getting married? Congrats, man!” The handshake turned into a brotherly grip with Ian cutting his eyes at me.

“Oh, Rachel is talking about me?”

“I was just telling Bird how excited I am for you,” I said.

“No worries, man,” Bird said. “Most people don’t know it, but the garage is just like a barbershop at times. Me and Miss Lady talk about a little bit of everything. And sometimes a lot of nothing.”