Drive
The subsequent visit to Evans & Thorton proved anticlimactic. “A lot of fuss over a car,” Elly opined.
Mr. Thorton smiled. “My experience is that the more detailed and dispassionate the will, the less the family discord during probate.”
Connor signed the last document. In exchange, Mr. Thorton gave him a Wasatch Auto Storage cardkey and a receipt. “This is yours as well.” He handed Connor the legal folder.
Mr. Thorton shook hands with them. Rose bid them good luck and goodbye.
“Your grandfather sure could keep a secret,” Elly said.
“Runs in the family. My dad used to buy Valentine’s chocolates for my mom, like, the week after Christmas to save money. He’d hide it, then forget where he put it. You never knew when or where a box of chocolates was going to turn up.”
Wasatch Auto Storage was located a block east of the Deseret Industries store at the north end of Provo. A little bell rang above the doorway when they walked in. A man wearing mechanic’s coveralls asked, “Picking up or dropping off?” The nametag over his left pocket identified him as “Boyd.”
“Picking up,” Connor said.
He showed Boyd the receipt. After checking his driver’s license, Boyd went to the filing cabinet and returned with a set of car keys and a release form. “Scotty!” he called out. A kid, maybe eighteen, poked his head into the office from the back room. Boyd, Jr., Elly guessed. “Unlock 23B for these good folks.” He handed Connor the keys. “A lucky man you are, Mr. McKenzie. We’re going to miss her. Your father’s car?”
“Grandfather’s.”
“You must have been his favorite.” He gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“Yeah,” Connor said, without conviction, “sure.”
Outside, Scotty jumped into an electric utility cart. They followed him through a maze of garages to 23B. Scotty unlocked the padlock and lifted up the garage door.
“There you go,” he said. “We keep the tank topped off to prevent condensation. You can leave the door open when you’re done.” He shook his head and grinned. “Man, I liked that car.” He hopped back into the cart and sped away.
“He liked the car,” Elly echoed.
“There’s no accounting for taste.” Connor tugged the tarp back from the back bumper on the driver’s side. Opposite him, Elly lifted up the cover and they slowly moved down the length of the car.
Connor undid the ties from the front bumpers. They lifted the cover off the hood, stepped to the side, and then walked toward each other, folding the tarp in half. Connor grasped it halfway up from the fold, Elly let go of her end, and he folded it over again.
She turned to look at the car. The sheen of deep, metallic blue flashed across her line of sight. A jolt of recognition coursed through her. She backed up until she was standing in a bright slash of sunlight. The sprinting silver horse gleamed brightly from the grille.
Connor stared at the car, his expression blank. He said nothing for a long time. And then muttered something under his breath in an strained, exasperated tone of voice. He slowly walked to the back of the garage and sat on an upended crate, hugging the car cover to his chest like a pillow.
Connor—” she said again.
He looked at her and said in genuine confusion, “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Drive it?” she said. She wasn’t trying to be flippant. She saw in his eyes the small boy sitting on the porch steps, torn by love and fear and apprehension. It was so obvious to her that his grandfather would do this, just as it was so obvious that his grandfather would loathe what he saw of himself in the boy. And yet at the same time dream that the boy could become all that he was not. Once upon a time Connor had asked for a glass of water, and now his grandfather had gone and given him Lake Superior instead.
It was so much easier to walk away from the past. But sometimes the past wouldn’t let go.
She said nothing but held him in her arms.
“I’m okay,” he said at last. There was a faucet by the garage door. He splashed water on his face, ran his hands through his hair, and blotted his face dry with the sleeve of his shirt.
Elly said, “Tell me about the car.”
Connor took a step back and surveyed what he saw. “A 1966 Mustang with a 289-cubic inch, 235-horsepower, A-code Challenger Special Veight engine. Four-barrel Autolite 4100 carburetor. Three-speed automatic transmission and front disc brakes. White Pony interior.” He opened the door for her. She got in. He went around to the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel. “I used to pretend—” he started to say, putting his hands on the steering wheel. He didn’t finish the sentence. He put the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled to life. The throaty sound resonated off the walls of the garage.
Elly found herself smiling. She could almost smell the testosterone in the exhaust. Her husband really was a closet gearhead. She suddenly felt a whimsical desire to dress up in a leather jacket and a miniskirt. But she got out of the car and said, “You’d better follow me. I don’t want you getting a speeding ticket your first day behind the wheel.”
“Here you go.” He tossed her the keys to the Camry.
“Buckle up,” she said.
Connor parked the Mustang next to the Camry. Aunt Wanda stood on the kitchen steps and marveled. “Where did he hide it?” she asked. “Wasatch Auto Storage.”
“Like your dad’s Valentine’s chocolates. None of us knew what he did
with it. It disappeared a few months before he died. His not wanting to talk about it wasn’t anything new. We assumed he sold it. That explains what he and Mr. Evans were up to.”
Connor folded his arms and shifted his stance. “Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it doesn’t seem fair.”
“That he gave it to you? I wouldn’t worry about that, Connor. The distribution of the estate was as fair as need be.”
“And there was that legal folder,” Elly said.
They sat down at the kitchen table. The bulkiest item in the folder was a book, Chilton’s Ford Mustang/Cougar 1964–73 Repair Manual. Connor said, “I remember this.” In the next divider were the title, registration and inspection papers for the car.
The only thing left was a white 10x12 envelope. Inside was a sheaf of papers and a floppy diskette. The floppy was labeled in his grandfather’s neat engineer’s hand: “McKenzie Temple Ready files.”
“Let me see those,” said Wanda. She stared, laughed, and shook her head in disbelief.
“What?” Elly and Connor asked together.
Wanda said, her eyes brimming, “Leave it to Dad to build himself a back door into heaven. These are his temple papers. That’s why you had to get married first, don’t you see.”
“You don’t have to be married to do temple work,” Elly said.
“True, but that’s not the way my father would have seen it, and getting his temple work done was not his sole intent.” She cast a pointed glance at Connor.
He smiled gamely, the look of a man cornered into doing the right thing, and resigned to doing it because it was the right thing.
Elly finished brushing her teeth. “It’s a good idea, don’t you think?” she asked, raising her voice so Connor could hear her from the kitchen.
He didn’t answer.
“Standing proxy for your grandfather and grandmother, I mean.” She came back into the bedroom. “All my genealogy’s been done already. I’ve never had the chance to be the proxy for somebody I was related to.”
Connor sat in bed, thumbing through the Chilton’s manual. “I would have done it whether or not he gave us the car.”
“It wasn’t conditional. Like Mr. Thorton said, it was up to you.”
“I would have done it.”
“Of course you would have. But out of duty.”
“I don’t know that it still isn’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be. You loved him, didn’t you? You must have, in some way.” She slipped into bed next to him.
He set the book on the nightstand. “Not the way I liked Billy’s grandfather. He smoked, drank, swore, and when I was a kid he was the only adult besides my own parents I really gave a damn about. He was in Japan during the Occupation. I went to see him when I got my mission call. He was in a nursing home by then, Alzheimer’s. He didn’t remember who I was. But I said I was Billy’s friend and I was going to Japan. He broke into a big smile. ‘Great place, Japan, even all blown to bits.’ I wished he was my grandfather instead—” His voice trailed off.
Elly rested her head against his shoulder. “It’s strange realizing there are people who loved us more than we ever loved them.” She said, “Your grandfather—have you ever gone to see him?”
“You mean his grave site? No, not since the funeral.”
“Where is he buried?”
“Provo Cemetery, next to Grandma.”
She sat up. “That’s only at the end of Ninth! Not in six years?”
“Cemeteries have never made sense to me. Obon does. I mean, at Obon you expect the dead to visit the living, you make plans.”
“A cemetery is the place where everybody knows you’ll turn up if you wait long enough. That’s why ghosts hang out in graveyards. They’re saying: you have my address, so come and see me sometime.”
He laughed. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you too, and I think you should go see your grandfather.”
He replied with a nod of his head. “Then I will.”
“Because you want to, or because I want you to?”
“The latter, to be honest.”
Elly thought about it. “A good enough reason,” she said. “That’s what wives do. Perfection of the soul through constructive nagging.”
The sun was bright on the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains. The dew glimmered on the grass. Connor stopped beneath the canopy of an old Cottonwood. “Here,” he said.
The polished granite marker was set flush with the grass. “Connor & Margaret Mia McKenzie,” Elly read aloud.
“Her maiden name was Maguire. So her full name was Margaret Mia Maguire McKenzie. She led an alliterative life.”
Elly knelt and brushed away the leaves. She laid the flowers she’d brought on the gravestone. She stood, bowed, and clapped her hands together twice, the form of ritual prayer observed at Shinto shrines. Having thus alerted the kami to her presence, she pressed her hands together, the tips of her fingers at the level of her chin. “Oj san, Ob san,” she said, “I thank you for giving me such an honorable grandson.”
She bowed, clapped her hands once more, lifted her head and smiled. She walked off, leaving Connor alone at the side of the grave.
A haunting but familiar voice behind him said, “Long time.”
Connor turned. The old man glanced away. He’d never been one to hold a look too long. Connor sat down on the cold concrete bench. He buried his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Nothing surprised him these days, certainly not his dead ancestors. He said, “Thanks for the car.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I would have liked riding in it when you were alive.”
“We worry about all the wrong things when we’re alive. You discover that clean upholstery doesn’t count for much when you’re dead.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” For a moment their eyes met. The old man almost smiled.
“I don’t get it,” Connor said. “What did you expect of me?”
“I expected you to be different. Different from what your blood made you. Different from me. Got no use for a carbon copy of a grandkid. All the problems you’ve been living with your whole life right there in living color? No thanks.”
“Nothing personal, but I never thought I was the same as you.”
“Family always makes for strange company. And it’s always personal.” This time Connor almost smiled.
“Tell me,” his grandfather said, “because this is the kind of thing you’d know, that expression, to thine own self be true, who said that?”
“Shakespeare. It’s from Hamlet.”
“Well, it’s garbage. Nobody’s self is true. We fall short, some of us more than others, but all of us at one time or another. Spend all your time trying to be true to yourself and you’re a dog chasing its own tail.”
“So why didn’t you change?”
“I did change. Not enough for your liking, seems. But you always were a hard kid to please.”
“I was a kid. What was I supposed to know that you didn’t?”
“What you were supposed to do was grow up. You were supposed to figure out that the way you saw the world then wasn’t the way the world is. That’s not the way I was every minute of the day. Can’t say I care for the way you decided to remember me.”
“So I was slow on the uptake. Maybe you died too soon.”
“Maybe. But the point is, people all over the place are convinced that whatever happened to them at the age of twelve becomes the unalterable truth for the rest of their blasted lives. Fact is, kids don’t know much. That’s what you’re supposed to learn when you grow up. But I’m beginning to wonder.”
“You know what, I still don’t like you.”
“I always loved you.”
Connor stared at him for a long minute. He’d never heard the word come out of the man’s mouth before, for any reason, in any context. “Hard to tell.”
“Love’s got nothing to do with like, boy. Love’s got to do with doing the right thing, like it or not. That wife of yours, that’s what doing the right thing is all about. You find somebody who can see clean through you.” He jabbed his forefinger at Connor’s chest. “Clean through you. Best thing you’ve ever done by a long shot.”
“I know that.”
“You’re halfway home then.” He stood and hitched up the khaki slacks he always wore. Connor had never seen a pair of jeans on the man.
“You want me to do your temple work?”
“Didn’t ask anybody else.”
“How about Grandma? How do I know she wants to be married to you forever?”
The old man laughed. “That’d be up to her, don’t you think? No need to start concerning yourself about decisions that aren’t yours to make.” He stepped to the walk, looked back a last time and said, “Think about this, Connor. Maybe I was exactly what you needed me to be.”
“And what’s that?”
He shrugged. “That’s your problem. You’re alive. I’m dead. It ain’t half bad where I’m at. But when you get to be my age, if you’re any bit an honest man, you’ll be thinking of a couple hundred ways you could have done it better—a hell of a weight to carry into eternity. Think about that for a change.”
Connor watched the lanky form disappear into the bright sunlight. He rested his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “Shimatta,” he muttered to himself. “What must having normal relatives be like?” His behind was cold. He got up and looked for Elly.
“Hey,” she said brightly. “I think I found some of your relatives.”
He read the marker she was examining. “Webster McKenzie. He was my grandfather’s brother, I believe.”
“What about Aunt Zariah?”
“She’s buried in Salt Lake.”
“We should go see her sometime too.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed the crown of her head. “So, wife, how long have you been a practicing Shinto?”
“I’m Shinto in cemeteries and on New Year’s. I’m Buddhist at Obon.” She glanced up at him. “Did you make your peace?”
“I don’t know. Like the blind man and the elephant, you think you’ve been holding on to the trunk of a tree when what you’ve got is a leg. And then it starts to walk away.”
“So you let go.”
“Easy to say. But it’s hard letting go of the way you think things were. Hard letting go, period. Still, leaving is preferable to being stuck. Once you’re stuck, the best thing you can do is start building walls. Moats and parapets are very much in the McKenzie architectural school of thought. To put it in pop-psych terms, it’s easy to confuse introversion with indifference.”
“Or antagonism.”
“We want the world to leave us alone and then we pout because the world doesn’t care.”
“I’ve always believed that being annoying was a positive attribute.”
“I think what he wanted was a Dennis-the-Menace type that would give him something real to get ticked off about. Somebody who’d fight back. What he got was another turtle.”
“He certainly came up with an interesting way of cracking your shell. And our great-great-grands were rascals enough to carry it off. Not that I’m ungrateful.” She kissed him for a long time. “After all,” she added, her hot breath clouding in the cool air, “you probably weren’t the kind of guy who ever made out in cemeteries before.”