It was one of those days when the air is poison.
The grass had started to turn brown and itchy. The grasses in the front yard planters were drooping. When I went out late in the morning to check on both gardens, I felt like I was wading through a swamp: hard to breathe, hard to get up, hard to move forward.
The only thing summer is good for is swimming or finding a forest to walk under a cool canopy. But the local pool wasn’t open yet, and we couldn’t get anywhere else with Serendipity still ready. I decided to stay cooped up in the house until the heat broke.
The first time they knocked on the door, hot air rushed into the house as I opened it. It looked like the devil himself was at the door, but it was just Jimmy and his son. His son smiled mischievously at me, hoping to be invited to see the guinea pig. Jimmy said he was walking to the market and came to tell me he was trying to rebuild our alternator. The Lost Girl’s family had scammed me into repairing the car with a dead 26 year old junk alternator from another Nissan that would have physically fit my car if they had known what they were doing. They had blunted it all wrong, breaking the radiator gooseneck and almost breaking the pumps. The Ebay parts company had sold Jimmy a working alternator that was wrong for my car and didn’t go in the bracket. We had ordered a third alternator which will be Monday, Wednesday at the latest. In the meantime, I was seeing if I could get the working machinery off the new alternator and stuff it into the outer casing of the old one, so we’d have a convenient spare.
“Are you sure the car will run after you put the alternator in?” I begged
“I’m sure. Well, 90% sure. When I started it before, everything worked except the gas pedal!” he reminded me. The new throttle body had made the gas pedal work again; it was just that the alternator was not feeding the battery.There could be new surprises, but I doubted it.
I thanked him and reminded him that I desperately wanted to get to Columbus by the middle of the month and said my goodbyes.
The next time Jimmy called, he was alone. His son was zipping back and forth on a scooter on the sidewalk. He showed me a screen of motor mounts on his broken phone as the hot air bubbled around us. I had been dissecting and examining my entire engine so there would be no surprises on Monday or Wednesday. That’s how he found that the engine mounts weren’t just a little rotten, they were broken. They had moved incorrectly when whoever put in my recovered engine tried to put it in. I could still drive the car, maybe for months, even on the freeway, as long as I used the torque belt, but we would need the brackets. as soon as. He could get them for eighty dollars, and he asked a hundred for labor. I promised him we would get to him somehow. I asked if he could still make it to Columbus by the middle of the month, and he said he certainly could with that torsion strap. I said goodbye.
The third time, her son wasn’t there at all. The cool of the day was setting in, so the air barely hurt me when I opened. It gave me a greasy greasy thing that looked like a bolt but wasn’t. It was a spark plug. “You need four of these. See the tip?” he said
I listened sleepily as he explained what the tip of a spark plug should look like, how they had killed each other, and where I could get four in town for twenty dollars.
I went inside and made the mistake of googling “spark plug oil”. I read about blown head gaskets and remembered when the lost girl told me I was dry of oil and coolant. Just when I decided Serendipity was a lost cause, I looked outside and saw that the sun was low. It was finally cool enough to go water my patch in the community garden.
I filled six jugs of water in the sink and put them in our shopping cart. I dragged them along the uneven sidewalk past Jimmy’s house to the corner. As he dragged them along, his son zipped up the scooter and introduced me to his friend, who was also on a scooter. She looked worried; he told me that they had running water in their house and that if I wanted I could have some.
Jimmy opened the hood of Serendipity, revealing an engine that was taken apart and still not put back together. I felt like I was watching the autopsy of a family member. He recounted the horror story for the hundredth time: how the Pittsburgh car dealer had sold me a Nissan with some undisclosed scrap salvage parts, and the only real problem was the engine mounts and rotten wiring . As the wiring harness had gotten worse and worse, it was shredded under the heat shield, causing the sensors to act up and the spark plugs to not fire. As it finally killed the alternator the week before Christmas and caused the car to stall spectacularly. The engine mounts were cracked, but the rest of the car was fine. The brakes and exhaust were fine, the lost girl had lied about those. The scrap engine was truly exceptional. It would be fine once I put it back together.
“Didn’t I blow a head gasket?” i escaped
No, certainly not. He had stood there listening to the engine, taking the sensors out one by one and putting them back in. If I had blown a head gasket, there would have been knock, water or smoke from the tailpipe, overheating, foamy oil. There was none of that.
“So why were the fluids low? And why was there oil all over the engine?”
Sometimes when the wiring messes up the sensors, they tell the computer that the car is too hot. I probably got the oil and antifreeze down that way. And the relative of the lost girl who put my oil in instead of changing it had poured the oil all over the engine like pancake syrup. I had a spray that would clean it. We would continue to monitor the fluids after driving again. He would give us our regular oil changes for only twenty bucks.
I admitted that I was terrified about it and frantic to get to Columbus, and he reiterated that I was sure I could make it.
I promised him that he would be our regular mechanic for any maintenance forever.
In the terrible cold of a polar blast, I had been informed that my car would not start again. Now, in the terrible heat of an Appalachian summer, it was coming back to life. Little by little and in the most annoying way possible, but we were almost there.
I went to water the garden.
When I returned, it was dark and wonderfully cool.
Michael wanted to be picked up at Kroger a mile away, so Adrienne and I got into the borrowed car with the angry brakes and warm air conditioning. We made it to Kroger just as it was closing. There was Michael, leaving. There were the employees, closing the door for the night.
The borrowed car gave an agonizing groan and didn’t roll an inch.
The brakes had finally given up the ghost. One rotor broke cleanly.
Michael and Adrienne walked the groceries home while I waited for the tow truck in the cool summer afternoon.
We are grounded for a few days. The alternator for our right car will be here no later than Monday, Wednesday.
I’m not well yet, but I will be soon.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Painsd Joys of Maryi Stumbling on Grace: How We Meet God in Small Works of Mercy
