The wrecker driver carefully dropped the Corvair’s rear wheel drum onto a cinder block in front of our garage, capping off a mortifying return to the scene of this morning’s triumphant seat belt installation. Before leaving, he handed me his business card. “You’ll need it,” he advised. In a few hours, I’d fallen from the euphoria of nominating myself to the Mechanics’ Hall of Fame down to the humiliation of needing my own personal on-call-around-the-clock tow truck.
Inside, I found Benjy in his bedroom, buried under the covers. As soon as the wrecker stopped in our driveway, he had raced dejectedly straight into the house. “How ya doin’?” I asked.
“Fine.” He sounded Not Fine.
“I apologize again for the wheel almost falling off. I’m really, really sorry.”
From under the covers, I heard nothing.
“Lydia is really nice, I think.” Still nothing. “Wanna talk?”
“No, thank you.”
I left him alone and headed to my office to catch up on work.
Two hours later, I heard him race downstairs and go outside, which he rarely did. Peering out the window, I saw a wheelchair beside my Corvair, which was now resting on jack stands. A man’s legs stuck out from under the car, looking like the mannequin legs in Kenny’s barn.
“What’s going on?” I asked Benjy when I got outside.
“I called a professional automobile mechanic and asked him to fix the Corvair,” Benjy said.
“You called Kenny? Why did you call Kenny?”
“Because we should have a professional automobile mechanic do this. You are not a professional.”
“I see. So you asked him to fix the broken wheel? Gave him our address?”
“Yes.” He eyed me with his big browns. “When I called, he said he was really sorry about being mean to me, and for the stuff he said, and that he was glad I called him. He said he sometimes gets in really bad moods. Because of his legs and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“I see. You don’t usually use the phone, Benjy.”
“The woman at James Monroe said I had to take the initiative. His phone number was in the Craigslist ad on the Internet.”
I sighed. “Hello,” I finally said to the legs sticking out from beneath the car. “Kenny, could you come out here a second?”
“Looks like someone did a nice job rebuilding this engine,” Kenny replied from under the car. “Not leaking a drop of oil.”
I still had thoughts of punching him. “Look, please come out here. I appreciate you coming, but I don’t want you to fix the car, okay? In fact, I’d like you to leave.”
He pushed himself out on my creeper. “When Benjy called, he told me about his Ass Burgers or whatever the hell it is, and I apologized to him. Which I wanted to do earlier, but I didn’t have your phone number. So now I’m apologizing to both of you, okay? I ain’t perfect. But I’m dealin’ with stuff, and now I’m gonna really deal with it. The docs at the VA give me pills to take, and maybe now I’ll take ’em, cuz what I said wasn’t right. I want to make it up to you.”
“It’s Asperger’s,” corrected Benjy. “Asperger’s Syndrome. People with Asperger’s call each other Aspergians or Aspies sometimes. My dad is an Aspie too, but not like me. He’s more like a normal.”
Kenny grinned at me. “Well, ain’t we a threesome?” he chuckled. “So, Big Ben, let me do you this favor and fix this.”
I still didn’t like him. I still wanted him gone, even if Benjy did like him. Who knew if or when he’d blow up again? And I didn’t want Benjy around when he did. “Please—really—I accept your apology,” I said, “but you don’t have to fix the car. I screwed it up, I want to fix it.”
Kenny shook his head doubtfully. “I’ll tell you right now, you made a helluva mess. There’s too much damage to fix for amateurs. And you don’t want to go to some tire shop where you got a kid banging on it who don’t know a Corvair from a can of tuna. They won’t have the right wheel studs. They’ll torque it all wrong. Like you did. And don’t EVER ask them to align the wheels—you’ll be in a World of Pain. You’re gonna need a new wheel, by the way. All that wheel wobble grooved out the holes. Yeah, you did a serious number on this bad boy. You got a decent spare?”
I guess Kenny didn’t appreciate the way I was looking at him. He sat up from the creeper.
“What?” he challenged. “I said I was sorry. You don’t want to drive your Vair? You don’t like free? You cain’t forgive? Then, of the three of us, I’d say you got the biggest problem of all.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Benjy said.
I finally relented.
“Now, if you could please get me the spare?” Kenny ordered. “It’s hard to get up off this creeper when your legs don’t work.”
“Don’t push my ability to forgive,” I shot back, as I opened the engine compartment and retrieved the spare tire. “Around our house, you better respect both of us.”
Momentarily chastened, Kenny nodded. Then he asked Benjy, with a wink, “Which was it you think got him? The forgiveness or the free?”
“Probably the free,” Benjy answered seriously. “He is cheap.”
“Benjy,” I cautioned, still steaming.
“It’s true,” he insisted.
“Don’t talk about private family stuff with strangers.”
“He’s not a stranger. His name is Kenny and this is the second time we’ve met him.”
“Look, Big Ben,” said Kenny. “I’ll be out of your way as soon as I’m done.” He turned to Benjy. “Kid, go to the World’s Coolest Car over there, please, and fetch my tool box. And the parts next to it.”
“My name is Ben,” I said coolly as Benjy hustled over to Kenny’s rust-splotched, down-in-the-mouth Early Model. “Not Big Ben.”
Kenny shrugged; he didn’t care.
“Uhhhh,” Benjy grunted as he lifted Kenny’s tool box. “It’s heavy!”
“Maybe the Ben that’s bigger will help you?” Kenny said, winking at me.
I should have been amused. Instead, I just wanted him gone.
“I’m okay!” Benjy insisted. He freed the tool box and waddled over with it. “This is really, really heavy!” he complained.
“Boy, where were you when they handed out muscles?” Kenny teased.
As Benjy hustled back to Kenny’s car for the parts, he noted, “Human beings all have the same number of muscles.”
“I see,” nodded Kenny, sending a look my way that said he was starting to understand a little more about Benjy’s Ass Burgers.
“I can read the directions, if you want,” offered Benjy. “I did that for my dad when we installed the seat belts.”
“You installed those seat belts in the rear?” Kenny asked me.
I nodded. Proudly.
Kenny shook his head. “Good thing I’m here. You need some rust preventer to cover those bolt heads. You drill holes through the bottom of a Corvair, you’re just beggin’ rust to come inside and eat it for lunch.”
My pride turned to cluelessness. Of course, he was right. Why hadn’t I thought of it?
“That wasn’t in the manual,” Benjy insisted. “The manual says —”
I interrupted, telling Benjy he didn’t have to recite the manual anymore.
“That’s okay. Nobody’s born a mechanic,” said Kenny, trying hard to show he’d turned over a new leaf. “Look at the bright side, you didn’t kill nobody.” He giggled to himself—so much for the new leaf. “I got a spray can of rustproofing in my car we can use. It’s just common sense, that’s probably why they don’t put it in the manual.” He put a hand on the brake drum to pull himself upright. “Hand me that hammer, please, Big Guy. It’s time to inflict some damage on this bad boy.”
“Do you want me to read the manual to you?” Benjy again offered, eagerly handing the hammer.
“I think I got this one covered,” said Kenny, maneuvering himself on the creeper. He banged the brake drum loose while schooling us on the art of replacing broken wheel lugs on a Corvair. Benjy was enthralled, concentrating hard, soaking the information in, memorizing.
With night coming fast, I watched from my office window while Benjy shouted “Bye!” and waved to Kenny as he drove off. After a few minutes of their nonstop Corvair chatter, I realized I was a third wheel. I wasn’t sure they even noticed when I’d returned inside.
Annie used to say, “Any friend of Benjy’s is better than no friend at all.” Clearly, she had never met Kenny. Still, he had taken Benjy’s mind off the catastrophe with Lydia, and I was thankful for that. And, reflecting back now, I couldn’t remember the last time Benjy and I had yakked for two hours about anything, as he had just done with Kenny. And I couldn’t recall the last time Benjy had waved goodbye to me without Mavis prompting him. I was jealous.
Polynomials, linear equations, factors, radicals, logarithms—I hadn’t crossed paths with these terms, symbols, and formulae in decades. Once upon a time, I must have known all this stuff, because I had graduated from college and knowing it was required to enter college. (There was a mathematical term for that kind of logic, but I’d long forgotten it.) So, as Benjy prepped to take his math assessment, I was useless to him. It didn’t matter, though; after weeks of taking the online tutorials, his practice assessment scores were high enough to avoid retaking the math courses he’d already passed in high school. He was ready to take the real test.
We drove the Corvair over to James Monroe, where Katie had reserved a private room in the school’s Learning Center for Benjy so he would not be distracted as he took the test. She and I made certain he had all the tools he was allowed: pencils, erasers, scratch paper, and a calculator. He was eager and confident. We high-fived, then he entered the private room. He had three hours to finish the test.
An hour later, he called. He was done. “It was easy,” he said. “I finished early.”
As I pulled the Corvair into the James Monroe circle, he was pacing to and fro, flapping his hand and reciting.
“Congratulations,” I crowed as he climbed in. “You want to celebrate?”
“No, thanks,” he said dourly.
“Maybe go to the McDonald’s drive-thru?” I urged, hoping he’d reconnect with Lydia.
“No, thanks,” he said more dourly.
“So what was your score?” I asked as we pulled away from the school.
“It wasn’t all we had hoped for,” he said, repeating the very same words he’d used to inform me he’d been rejected by Wheeler.
“I thought it was easy,” I said.
“So did I. When I called you, they hadn’t scored the test yet.”
He told me his score; it certainly wasn’t “all we had hoped for.” In fact, it was so bad that he now faced taking two and a half years of remedial math before he would be allowed to enroll in his one required college math course. Or, he could sign up for intensive tutoring at James Monroe, then retake the assessment. He quickly agreed to the tutoring.
“I thought I did good,” he said, perplexed. Then he asked, “Dad, why do I need to know more math than you?”
“I don’t know.” I pulled onto the main highway and suggested we go to McDonald’s, hoping to cheer him up. “We might see Lydia,” I said, foregoing subtlety.
“No, thank you,” said Benjy tersely.
“We could apologize again for what happened. Show her the car’s fixed.”
“She hates this car,” he erupted. “You always tell me to pick up on the social cues! She called it a Deathmobile! Wasn’t that a pretty obvious social cue?”
“Maybe we can change her mind,” I said calmly. “The same way you changed your mind about this car.”
“She has a boyfriend, Dad!”
“That doesn’t mean she can’t be your friend. I think she really likes you as a friend.”
Benjy shook his head from side to side. Absolutely not.
“Okay, so what do you want to do?” I asked. “Eat lunch someplace else? Go home?”
“I want to go to Kenny’s,” he said.
I sighed. Loudly. Disapprovingly. He picked up that social cue right away.
“He said I should come by, he had something he wanted to show me.”
“When did he say that?”
“Before he left our house.”
I sighed so long that I ran out of air and coughed. The Mother of all Social Cues.
“You and Mom told me I should try to make friends,” said Benjy. “I did. Kenny is my friend. I’m old enough to choose who I want to make my friend.” He fixed his brown eyes on me.
I sighed again. Because he was right. I set the Corvair on a course toward Kenny’s.