upkeep

“You want to learn this stuff sometime?” | short fiction

Photo by Dan Crile on Unsplash

The hood is up. Dad’s leaning into the engine, interrogating it, oblivious to the Gorbachev grease smudge on his cheek.

I’m standing behind him, holding a flashlight—a flashlight in broad daylight, my thumb tracing its nippeloid on/off switch, mildly sweating.

He asks for a socket wrench, “…the 10-mil.” I stare at the tools festooning the driveway, all of them wrench-shaped, none of them labeled. I’m suddenly eight again, standing stupid, sucking a lolly as he conjures a tree house out of wood and magic.

“…sometime today kiddo.”

I panic-grab the nearest wrench-like thing. He takes it and twists something deep in the car’s belly, saying nothing. Victory.

I peek at the engine—a senseless Medusa hive of wires, belts, and shining nubs. I think of the lunatic in a garage somewhere who figured this all out, the grease-covered prophet who saw this metal mess and thought, "Yep, this will get the world where it needs to go."

“Hear that clicking?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Gotta be your timing chain…even if it’s off by a little, the whole kit goes to shit. That!…hear that?”

I strain my ears but get nothing, only the insect screech of Mr. Poe’s weedwacking and the occasional bird chirp. I hum a confident “mmmmm” and nod even though his back’s to me.

He’s always hearing things I can’t—the way the furnace rattles in the winter or the way the roof talks after a heavy snow or the nearly imperceptible screams of something about to break.

I watch the sun ripple from Mr. Poe’s balding head, clicking the flashlight on/off, on/off, enjoying its popcorn sound.

“You gotta stay on top of this stuff kiddo—oil changes, rotations, filters…if you don’t, it’ll cost ya later.”

I nod again, unseen. His tone feels accusatory; my reflexes jerk me ramrod straight. I stop clicking the flashlight. That’s dad-speak for “you’re always letting things slide kiddo, stop fucking up, get it together for Christ’s sake—credit card balances, unopened mail, the nice girls you meet and ghost, meet and ghost…”

Turns out adulthood isn’t the gradual becoming you’re told about in middle school; it’s a series of small, quiet failures piling up up up, frog in pot style until there’s five hundred pounds of Earth on your sternum.

He has a way of knowing everything, even about the girls…girls like Chelsea, the soft-spoken, kind-eyed beauties who text me links to long articles that I skim until I’ve collected enough data to send back some vaguely thoughtful emoji. Girls who mail me books of Frank O’Hara poems, not for my birthday or Christmas or anything special, just because the words “felt like me,” which I don’t totally understand but find flattering in a way that never fails to make me guilty.

Anyway, Chelsea was just another incarnation of the pattern. We went on a few dates, low-stakes stuff—movies, noodle bowls, park walks—it was great, she was great—is great but like usual, at some point, I stopped texting back. Not in a dramatic or malicious way, but in that quiet, church mouse way where you keep meaning to but the window of response gets wider and the silence calcifies and eventually it’s more merciful to say nothing.

Dad wouldn’t understand that my lizard brain does this to protect people. I retreat to spare them disappointment—the disappointment that’ll inevitably fuzz their belly when they look close enough to see how little I know about things—real things—about cars or taxes or savings accounts and how I sometimes forget to eat and let the cat’s litter overflow. It’s easier to disappear than to be found out.

Maybe I could try to text her back? She was cute and seemed like she’d understand. I feel like she’d—

“You want to learn this stuff sometime? I can show ya.”

I say, “yeah maybe,” but I don’t mean it. It isn’t because I don’t want to learn—I think I do, I probably do it’s just learning feels so overwhelming, like it’s too late—I’m too late, I missed the window and now soaking up anything new is destined to be a slog. If only I’d paid attention to things all along, I would’ve picked it up through some epistemic osmosis and not be standing here, a thirty-five-year-old “man” fingering a useless flashlight’s nipple.

I wonder what he would say if I told him I try—that I try to learn, try to make up lost ground. That when I feel the voids inside—the little hollow parts that throb when I’m left alone too long—I pick up a book or scroll an explainer or watch someone smarter than me diagram a concept on a whiteboard but the same thing always happens. When I reach the a-ha! moment and the voids feel temporarily sated, the moment I underline the crucial passage, the life-changing info, dog-ear the page, I’ll think oh this is it, this is the bit that fixes me, and pour a glass of wine and flick on the tube completely forgetting anything I’ve read but despite this I feel blessed—given a new context to brood over as I clock in at the pet store and make sure all the cat food is facing the same direction.

“Alright, hand me that torque wrench.”

He senses my panic.

“…the tube looking one by your left foot.”

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