Even in the bone-numbing cold, his fingers continued to probe and twist—knuckles glowing red from blood and freezing temperatures. Coffee in a stained and chipped mug balanced precariously on the edge of the open engine compartment, the steam rising tantalizingly into the air and its aroma mixing with the smell of grease and hot metal. The old man rarely sipped from the cup. The mere fact of its presence seemed to reassure him.

“We can check the distributor,” he said between breaths as he somehow contorted his strong fingers into strange configurations to reach into the depths of metal and wire. “If you’re not getting spark then everything else we check will be a waste of time.”

He spoke as if these mechanical excursions were an imposition on him-cutting into valuable retirement time—but he never failed to find one more thing that needed to be cleaned, checked or replaced. A quick fifteen-minute job easily turned into two hours spent in the elements; neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night will deter the old man from tinkering with one of his son’s unreliable automobiles. The walls of the “garage” offered little protection—one end was completely open and one wall remained unfinished, consisting of nothing but vertical wooden slats that the wind whistled through. The building had stood thus for over thirty years and would probably remain so for another thirty. Garage repairs always stood fairly low on the old man’s “to do” list.

Nearby, a dog lounged on some greasy rags watching the old man with big, brown eyes. There was unconditional love in those eyes. They followed every movement the old man made. When he needed a wrench from his workbench and left the engine compartment to retrieve it, the dog got up and trotted happily after him, standing against his leg as the old man searched for the right size. When he found it he stroked the dog’s head and scratched his shaggy ears for a moment before returning to the job.

The son stood to the side and watched, mostly. Even the dog seemed to contribute more, since, if nothing else, his father could warm his fingers in its thick fur for a few minutes. The son’s coffee seemed to get cold immediately and he had to drink it fast. After all the years of watching his father work on cars he still hadn’t learned any of his secrets.

Those calloused hands had brought back many an automobile from the dead. Where others have given up hope, that’s where his father’s stubbornness, curiosity and knowledge combined to create mechanical miracles. He’s seen resuscitations that would make veteran surgeons jealous. And these feats were generally performed with nuts and bolts fished out of greasy mason jars, pieces of old aluminum pipe and duct tape. He once had a car that lost its entire exhaust system. His father rigged something up with pieces from one of the other parts cars that he always had littering up the place, held it all up with some bent clothes-hanger, and the car ran for another few months until something else came up wrong with it.

But the boy could never grasp any of it. He watched but his mind wandered. If it was winter he would stand with his hands in his pockets, resenting it when he was asked to pass a ratchet or a flashlight. If it was summer he tried to stand in the shade and stay clear of the uncomfortable warmth of the engine. It didn’t matter—the son could never retain anything. He kept the dog company on the sidelines while his dad worked slowly and diligently. His only real role was being a blank wall that his father could bounce his ideas off of instead of having to talk to himself.

On this particular winter’s day as he watched his dad’s rough and damaged fingers feeling their way among the wires and metal and tubing, he decided it was time. This poor man had been doing this thankless job for years and he deserved to be spared. Love played a part in what next transpired, sure. But let’s be honest here, there was a fair measure of guilt motivating him, too. Whatever, he suddenly stepped out of the wintry shadows of the garage and pushed his way in between his father and the car. “Here, Dad, I’ll check the distributor,” he said with confidence. He’d watched his father do it a hundred times. He’d done it himself, with supervision, a couple of times before. Anyway, he knew what a distributor looked like, which was more than he could say about a lot of automotive parts.

“Well,” his dad said. He looked like he wanted to say more, but then he just moved aside and picked up his coffee cup, still warm although it had been sitting outside for at least half an hour. “You know how to—?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, his head already deep within the engine compartment. He took a breath and made his first incision, so to speak; he snapped one of the latches on the distributor cap. Nothing caught fire. No alarms went off. The dog let out a low whine and then was still. The day suddenly seemed oppressive. He let his swiftly numbing fingers slide across the cap to the next latch. Snapping it, he moved a little more quickly to the last one. A second later he had successfully removed the distributor cap! He set it aside and looked over at his father. He handed the boy an oily rag and he wiped the beads of cold sweat from his forehead. The dog was sitting up now, a strange gleam in its eye.

What do you do with the distributor cap once removed? The question rolled around in his head while precious seconds ticked by. As the son furiously racked his brain for the next step, his eye caught the delicate trace of a hairline crack running along the inside of the distributor cap.

“Crack!” he yelled triumphantly, holding the cap up for his father’s inspection and approval. The dog jumped to its feet and slobbered its encouragement all over his pants leg. His father stepped back to the car and took the cap in his hands, those amazing hands. He eyed it speculatively, then took a rag and wiped at it a little.

“It’s a crack, all right,” he said. “Good catch.” He took the cap and placed it in a box then finished off his coffee in one gulp. “Well drive into town and pick one up.”

The father and son walked up to the house, the dog trotting between them in happy zigzags. They refilled their coffee cups and the father told his wife that their son had found the problem. His mother looked skeptical, but praised him anyhow and it felt good. On the drive into town, his father talked of cars he had owned and worked on in the past. These stories never stayed with the cars, of course, but branched out into all sorts of tales that he saved up for the boy—not his wife, not the dog, but his son.

And even though it was still winter outside and their fingers were red and numb with cold, they looked forward to the fifteen-minute job that waited for them back home.

The End