The Auto Shop

My wife and I where both born and raised in the same small town in southern Indiana. Childhood sweethearts I guess that's what you'd call us. Nancy, my wife, was the only child of a middle class family. She had the blackest hair I'd ever seen and her skin was as light as milk. Her eyes were bright blue and she always wore deep red lipstick because she said it gave her face some color so she wouldn't look like warmed over death. Put them all together, and to me, she was the most beautiful woman that ever walked the Earth.

Her Dad worked in a machine shop and her Mom was a homemaker who worked part-time at a florist shop, normally only when things got real busy like during Easter or Mother's Day.

My Dad drove one of the few cabs in town. He didn't own it, he worked for the guy that did and it always bothered him that he had to work for someone else. He told me that there couldn't be anything better in life than for a man to own his business and not have to answer to a boss. It never worked out for him though, because he drove another man's cab his entire life, in fact, he passed away behind the wheel of one. He had a heart attack while waiting on a fare.

My Mom was also a homemaker, like Nancy's Mom, but she never worked outside the house. She was too busy raising the family to do anything else. There were four kids in my family. I'm the oldest, and I have two brothers named Tom and Mike and the youngest is my sister Becky. We're all in our sixties now so it is kind of funny to call Becky the youngest but I suppose some things never change. Their all doing ok and looking forward to retirement.

I always felt that Nancy's parents kind of looked down on me and my family as not being good enough for their daughter. Her Dad made pretty good money as a machinist and he was able to buy a new home, a rancher, in a subdivision that was built after the war. My family lived in an old two story shotgun three blocks from Main Street. Dad kept the outer side of it up and Mom kept the inside sparkling clean. She would get down on her hands and knees and paste wax the hardwood floors. They were so slick you really had to be careful if you were only wearing socks because you'd slip and bust your ass. I never looked down on that house, because Mom always kept it clean, and the yard looked nice because Dad made a lot of flower beds around it, Mom loved flowers, especially marigolds. I'll admit the houses around of us didn't look that hot because they were rentals, but I never thought that Nancy's parents should hold that against me or my family.

Nancy and I sort of knew each other all our lives. We went to the same elementary school and middle school, but it wasn't until the ninth grade that we really saw each other for the first time, you know, boy - girl, stuff. All through high school we went steady and both of us knew that it was real love, so right after we graduated we got engaged. Her parents tried to talk Nancy out of it, especially her Mom, but Nancy had made up her mind. We were married a year later.

What can I tell you about being so young and married? If you've been there you know, if you haven't, all I can tell you it's the best time of your life, and other times, it's harder than anything you'll ever do. There's a lot of fire and passion between a young married couple, Nancy and me were no exception, but sandwiched between the love and lovemaking are the facts of everyday life. There were always bills and never enough money. We'd get a little ahead and something would always come up to knock us back.

I was working as a car mechanic at a shop in town, I've always been good with my hands, I took auto shop in high school and always had a clunker of my own that I worked on constantly, so it was natural that I became a mechanic. Nancy was working as a waitress at a diner just a block from the auto shop so I was able to slip out of work when things were slow and see her over a cup of coffee or a Coke. The best thing was that both the diner and the auto shop were just a couple of blocks away from our apartment, so we were able to have our lunch breaks together in our apartment. In the early years of our marriage we never did get around to actually having lunch, if you know what I mean.

I guess my Dad was responsible for me wanting to have my own business because he talked about having one of his own so often. When you're a mechanic, and a really good one, you're as important as any doctor or lawyer. Everyone relies on their cars and when they break down people are desperate to have them fixed. I'd get calls all the time from friends and relatives asking if I could come over to work on their cars, partly because they didn't want to pay a towing bill to have them brought to the shop and also because my boss would charge them out the ass to repair them. It wasn't long that enough people were calling me that I decided to open my own shop. Nancy was worried to death, she said it was risky and told me that we were doing ok so why change things. I told Nancy I loved her more than anything and promised her that regardless of what happened, I would always take care of her. My boss didn't like it at all and told me that I'd never make it. He said there wasn't enough business in town for two shops and that when I went under and came back begging for a job, he'd tell me to kiss off.

Over the years I had stashed away a few bucks from working on cars on the side and used that as seed money. I rented an old barn just outside town from a retired farmer, Mr. Hollingsworth. He had sold off most of his equipment and livestock and let his land lay fallow, so he didn't need the barn but could use my rent money to supplement his social security. Even though I had a lot of my own tools, Mr. Hollingsworth owned a bunch of stuff and he let me use his tools as part of the deal.

My first official customer was, get this, my old high school principle, Mr. Jordan. He was always tight with a buck and it torqued him to pay the high prices the shop it town charged. He and I had several runs ins during my school days, once he caught Nancy and me kissing in the hallway and threatened to expel us. We didn't like each other that much, but we both shared one thing in common and that was money. He had some and I wanted it. He called and told me the water pump on his Hudson had gone south and asked if I could fix it. I asked him where the car was and he said it was at his home. I took Nancy along with me and we drove over to his house stopping along the way to pick up a new pump at a parts place. Now I'll be honest, I could have put that pump on his car right then and there in his driveway in less than an hour but I didn't. I told Mr. Jordan I'd have to take his car to my shop because I didn't have any tools with me, which was a lie because the trunk of my car was full of them.

I had an old tow strap with me and tied the Hudson, with Nancy behind the wheel, onto my car and as we drove off both of us waved goodbye. When we got to my shop Nancy had laughed so hard she actually peed her herself a little and had left a small wet spot on the bench seat of the Hudson. In between kisses and laughs, Nancy and I changed the pump. I charged Mr. Jordan, twenty dollars for parts and labor and five bucks for the tow, but I threw in the wet spot Nancy had left for free. When I returned the car to Mr. Jordan, I made sure to use his first name William whenever I could fit it into the conversation, I could tell he didn't like it but he didn't say anything, because you don't want to piss off a good mechanic that has reasonable rates.

By the end of the first year my shop was doing so good it was almost scary. I hired my old high school buddy Dennis to take care of the small stuff like oil changes and tires, while I worked on the bigger jobs like engine overhauls. The money just rolled in. Nancy quit her job at the diner and started keeping the books and would pick up parts when we needed them. We were able to put a down payment on a small rancher in the same subdivision her parents lived in. Those were really good days but they came to an end when Mr. Hollingsworth died.

One morning when I drove up the road to the shop I could see off in the distance Mr. Hollingsworth's house and the small chicken coop he kept out back. The chickens were out of the coop and roaming around the yard which was kind of strange because Mr. Hollingsworth never let them out that early. I parked my car and walked across the field to the house. I found Mr. Hollingsworth dead, lying on the ground with a bucket of feed beside him. The police said he died of natural causes, most likely the day before I found him. Now I'll tell you this, Mr. Hollingsworth was one of the finest men you'd ever want to meet and it tore me up when he passed. But as bad as that was things got worse. His children decided to sell the farm lock, stock and barrel. I offered them good money for the barn and two acres of land but they wanted to sell the farm in one piece figuring they get a better price. I didn't have near enough money to buy the whole place and they only gave me until the end of the month to clear out. The cherry on top of all this was two weeks earlier Nancy had told me she was pregnant.

Nancy was pretty scared and wanted to go back to work at the diner until the baby came. She said some money coming in was better than nothing, but I wouldn't let her. I told her we'd make it somehow. The biggest problem we had was finding another building to rent for the shop. I looked all over town and out in the country but couldn't find anything. Our bills were starting to eat away at our savings and things were looking pretty damn grim. One day I got a call out of the blue from Robert Carlson who worked at the bank. I'd worked on his car before and thought he just needed a tune up or something, but he said he'd heard what happened to my shop and wanted me to stop by the bank because he might be able to help me. I've got to admit I was a little leery of the whole thing because Robert dealt in making money, not giving it away. He was tighter with a buck than my old high school principal, but at that point I didn't have a whole lot of options.

When Roger and I sat down together he already had everything figured out. There was a vacant lot just on the edge of town that would be the perfect location for an automotive shop. It was almost in the town itself and was near the state highway that intersected with Main Street. All the utilities were already there, water, sewer, electricity, so developing the lot wouldn't cost an arm and leg. Roger said that if I could manage to buy the lot free and clear that his bank could offer me a construction loan of at least twenty thousand dollars to build a shop. I was numb, here I was thinking I was still a kid at twenty five years old and Roger was throwing big numbers at me. I asked him what the lot was going for and he told me seven thousand. I remember that I almost threw up.

Seven grand was more than me and Nancy had even if we hocked our clothes. I had about three thousand equity in our house, fifteen hundred in savings, and about another five hundred that was owed me for repair work that I hadn't collected. I told Roger that there was no way I could swing it, because I was two grand short.

Let me tell you something about bankers. If they believe that they can make a dollar off you, with minimal risk, they can work numbers to the point that silver dollars fly out of their butts, and that's what Roger did.

When I went home and told Nancy about Roger's plan she was in tears, not normal tears, but full scale, put on your rain gear, cause we're gonna stand under Niagara Falls tears. I told her it was simple, we take out a second mortgage on the house, put up all our cash, we sign a personal note for fifteen hundred and we sell everything we don't absolutely need. It sounded like a great idea to me and I couldn't really understand why Nancy was so upset. After she had calmed down and stopped crying, we talked it out all through the night. Nancy told me she loved me and wanted a good life for us and the baby. She thought that this was the biggest gamble that we would ever take in our lives and if we lost we'd never recover from it. I told here I loved her more than she would ever know and that I would give up my own life for her and our child, that I'd always be beside her forever, because that's what marriage is all about.

Our yard sale netted the five hundred dollars we needed. Along with all the useless stuff people seem to collect, Nancy sold a really nice set of china that her parents had given her as a wedding present and an antique rocking chair that she inherited from her grandmother. I sold a lot of hand tools and a Model A Ford that I got from a farmer because he couldn't pay his bill on an engine overhall I had done on his tractor.

We were flat broke and deeply in debt to everyone, but we owned the building lot. Nancy was six moths pregnant, and as our new shop was being built, we worked together repairing cars all night long to raise cash. I can still remember one night, when it was snowing like crazy, that Nancy held a flashlight for me while I put a new starter on a Mercury. I was laying underneath the car in the snow and looked up and saw Nancy was shivering. About that time I was so pissed off about everything I got out from under the car, took Nancy by the arm and we walked up to the owner's home. I banged on the door and when the owner answered, I told him that if he wanted his car fixed he better drag his ass out of the house and hold a light for me, and he better have his wife take Nancy into the house and give her something hot to drink, tea or coffee, whichever Nancy wanted, or I was leaving and to hell with his car. The guy was a salesman and he needed to be at an important out-of-town meeting in the morning so he didn't really have a choice in the matter. That was the low point of my life, putting Nancy through all that while she was pregnant.

The contractor that built my shop did a great job in record time. He fancied himself as a self trained architect and he put a lot of unusual features into the shop. There were a lot of large glass windows in the office space that fronted the street and the shop bay had four large roll up doors, two on either end so you could drive right through it. The roof was kind of crazy looking with a lot of weird angles that the contractor said he got the idea for after seeing a picture of a Swiss chalet in National Geographic. At the time I had no idea what a chalet was but didn't want to look foolish by asking him. All in all it looked great and the best part was, it was mine.

From the moment I entered the shop, I swear, I worked damn near around the clock for four years. I'd get there at five in the morning and leave around eight at night. Nancy was a real peach during those years. I would come home at night, covered in grease and oil, and she'd be waiting for me at the front door with a cold beer and a kiss. As soon I stepped in the house she made me take off my all my dirty clothes, and as I took a hot bath she'd be putting supper on the table. When I got out of the bath she always had clean clothes already laid out for me on our bed. She still did the shop's books, raised our three children, all girls, and kept the house going. She worked every bit as hard as I did.

The shop business was booming, there was always plenty of work because the state route brought in a lot of customers and the town itself was growing year after year. More people always means more cars. I had hired three guys to help me, one of them being my old buddy Dennis. By our fifth year I had made enough money to pay off the loan on the shop, after that, all the money it made was gravy. It was then that Nancy told me to slow down and enjoy life a little. She insisted that I only work eight hours a day, which was hard getting used to at first because I had been going full bore for so many years.

It was about six years later when I woke up one morning and realized I was rich. Nancy and I had been living in our new home for about a year. It was a big, beautiful thing, on a lake, built by the same crazy contractor that had built my shop. The house had a strange roof line that the contractor said was inspired by a Shinto shrine. I didn't ask him about it because it had taken me six years to understand what a chalet was, but I did figure out that he still had a subscription to the Geographic.

I had built up a lot of cash and my banker Roger encouraged me to invest it in other businesses around town. I became part owner of a furniture store and a pharmacy, built a new car wash, and to this day, I still don't know how, Roger convinced me that the town needed a pet shop, which I thought was nuts because there were so many stray cats and dogs around town that all you had to do was buy a thirty cent can of Kal Kan, put it out in a bowl, and bang you had a pet. To my amazement all the businesses made money even the pet store.

So Nancy and I were rich, which after all we'd been through together was a blessing. But a funny thing happens when you're a couple and you've got it made. After years of relying on each other through the hard times, because the person sitting across from you at breakfast is as important to your own survival as the air you breathe, when the good times come that need isn't there anymore.

I can't point to a time when Nancy drifted away from me. It just happened gradually. Our daughters had graduated from college and our oldest one Kimberly was already married. One day I came home from the shop and found Nancy sitting quietly on the couch with a highball. She looked sad, like someone had died, but I noticed she hadn't been crying. For a solid week we spent hours talking about us. We relived every moment of our life together, both the good and the bad, and when we were done it came down to two simple facts. I told her that I loved her as much as the day I married her, and she told me that my love for her wasn't enough anymore.

A week later Nancy filed for divorced. She listed all the things she wanted out of our marriage and I didn't argue a bit. She deserved everything she asked for. She got the house and everything in it, all our side businesses and half of all our cash. I kept the shop.

From then on, my daughters' told me, Nancy spent a lot of time traveling. She went all over, from New York to Mexico and every place in between, one year she even went to Europe. It didn't make sense to me, I never could figure out exactly what she was looking for. Every once in a while when she was in town I'd see her on the street or in a store but it wasn't that often, maybe four or five times over the years. Of those times, we only made eye contact once, we didn't speak to each other, we just looked at each other across Main street. She didn't smile at me, but she didn't frown either, she just gave me an empty look.

It was June 12, 1981 that my daughter Kimberly told me that Nancy had passed. That was the saddest point of my life because I always hoped that some day we'd get back together. A lot of women think that their men take them for granted but I never felt that way about Nancy. She was everything to me. She was my wife, my lover and the best friend I ever had.

The funeral home had scheduled a viewing between six and eight in the evening, and I them asked them if I could come at eight - thirty so I could be alone with Nancy. When I saw her she looked as beautiful as the day we married and I couldn't help myself from crying. I didn't say a whole lot to her. Just that I loved her and I was sorry for what happened between us. I figured that it was only right to leave something with her of our time together. I took off my wedding band and placed it in her casket and I also put in the flashlight that she held for me when we were working on the Mercury in that snow storm when we were young. I had kept it all those years, and I was going to have it gold plated and give it to her on our fiftieth wedding anniversary, but that wasn't meant to be.

They say that the number one cause of marriages breaking up is over money and I'd have to agree. What they don't tell you is that it goes both ways. Too little or too much can hurt you. But I think, what a marriage really comes down to is that regardless of what you have or don't have, is that both of you, in some way, need each other.