“Nothing wants to come to an end,” I tell Gus, borrowing the words he’d used to describe storms. “Not a man, not a plant, and not a car, either. A car doesn’t want to get squashed. A car wants to keep moving,” I insist, now borrowing Mr. Bradshaw’s words. “Think of it, Gus—all those gears and wheels and spinning parts. Those beautiful, shining bumpers! Think of what we could make!”
Gus stares at me, his face a blank space on a test sheet. He’s still deciding what he thinks.
“Wind chimes, Gus!” I shout. Because it would be so much fun if our house also sounded pretty.
Gus rubs the stubbly whiskers on his chin, thinking. When his face starts to disappear beneath one of those Cheshire grins, I know I’ve got him.
Gus and I pull the fan from the engine. He drills holes in the blades, and we hang springs and gears and nuts and bolts from long threads of wire. Together, we hang the finished wind chime from the top of the porch. The fan spins and the pieces knock against each other, making notes that sound like they’ve come from a xylophone. It’s like the wind has grown fingers, and I’ve given it an instrument to play.
We make three more wind chimes. We use a hubcap, a license plate, and the steering wheel to dangle the metal Monte Carlo symbol pried from the trunk, the door handles, the radio antenna, the hood ornament, even pieces of the grille Gus has sliced with his cutting torch. Together, all four chimes play a tune that reminds me of some of the songs I can hear the Widow Hollis play on her piano when she has her front windows open.
So much of the car is still left over. Only four days stand between us and our open house.
“More flowers—but not little flowers, this time, Gus!” I shout. “Enormous flowers! Tall as a man!” Because if the rest of the car isn’t going to move anymore, at least it will stand tall and proud. Besides, the metal flowers we already have are so small, it’s a little hard to see their details from the street.
Gus fires up his torch again. I’m holding up metal pieces, saying, “Why don’t we use this bumper as a stem?” or, “These window cranks could be the thorns on a rose!” or, “Couldn’t we cut these two hubcaps to look like unopened buds?”
I start to wonder how you know for sure if something really is your shine. When did Irma Jean officially know she was a good seamstress? When did Lexie realize she could come up with all those wild hairdos? Did they ever trip up and have to start a new skirt or a braid over again—or does a shine always come easily?
I don’t have enough time to think too much about it, not with all these new ideas popping up everywhere I look.
“Headlights,” I tell Gus. “The headlights can be the centers of giant sunflowers!”
His grin is so bright I can almost see it glowing behind his welding mask.
For the next few days, we work on a whole slew of flowers, modeling most of them after the pictures in a book I’ve checked out from the library: orchids with their big fleshy petals. Gladiolas with three or four blossoms on the same stem. Carnations with folds and folds of petals inside. Blooms of baby’s breath as big as Gus’s head. We even make a few mums—just like the ones I saw out at Burton’s house.
When we’re finished with the flowers, the smallest ones come all the way up to my chin. Most are as tall—or taller, even—than Gus. But they’re heavy and they keep falling over every time we try to “plant” them.
Gus tugs on his bottom lip, thinking. “We need to find something solid that we could tie them to.”
My eyes scan our house. They stop when they hit the chimney.
The neighbors cluster across the street—some of them with binoculars pressed up against their eyes—as Gus helps me off the ladder and onto the roof.
“They’re worried about you,” he says. “I’m worried about you.”
“Oh, Gus,” I say. “I’m not going to fall. Promise.”
I whistle to myself, until Gus finally follows my lead, adding harmony to my tune.
“Pass me that hammer, there, Auggie.”
“You got it,” I say, reaching for the tool with one hand while holding an enormous pansy up with the other. The way I have to bend myself around, it’s like I’m playing a game of Twister up there on the roof.
We hammer nails through the holes Gus has drilled into the bottoms of the metal flowers, then use bright red rope to attach the flowers to the chimney. We tie the rope in a gigantic bow, so that it looks like a red ribbon holding a bouquet of flowers together.
It reminds me of the fancy bouquets inside the door of the Super Saver grocery. The bouquets Gus and I can never afford because we’re always needing more boring stuff like bread and milk and flour. Now, we’ve got the biggest, brightest bouquet of all!
With the xylophone clank of wind chimes filling the air, and a bouquet on the roof, and the rainbow of colors swirling across the front of our home, I feel like we’re officially ready for tomorrow’s open house.