He was the father of three kids and eight cars. His nails were never clean and he never tried to clean them. That was one of the last straws with his wife, the dirty fingerprints on her clean towels. He once used a towel to dry a car.

The obsession with cars was under control until he lost his only son, Clarence, in the war. It wasn’t called a war, like Vietnam, it was called a ‘conflict’. After that, he made sure he knew all of his daughters’ plans, their friends, their friends’ plans and all of their boyfriends. He even tried to tolerate their music. But there was only so much of pop culture that he could take before he had to go out to the garage again and feel like the world hadn’t dropped out from under him. The Weevils, or whoever, made no sense to him. A car and its parts, perfect sense. Once the girls married and his wife finally left him, he went back to the cars, though his ex-wife took one in the divorce.

Every summer, his only granddaughter from his younger daughter visited him. Once she had left the town next to the middle of nowhere, she dragged him to museums and galleries. He didn’t understand the canvas with a black stripe across it, and neither did she but she tried not to show it. When he pleaded old age and tried to stay home, she brought home books and movies, though he refused to call documentaries movies. Her curiosity unquenched, the next summer she planned ahead and enrolled at a community college for two classes. He tried to make her stop taking the evening class after a man tried to mug her on her way home, but she calmly explained that the mugger had failed at the attempt and ended up with a bloody nose while she only had a bloody textbook to show for it. They settled on him driving her to the evening class, but she chose the most inconspicuous car. At the end of the summer, she planned to attend a concert for a band he didn’t understand. She spoke highly of them, as she had of all the museums’ exhibits and the art and the classes, so he trusted her judgment and let her go.

When his granddaughter died on the way to the concert, he refused to leave his home for weeks, spending most hours in teh garage, waiting for the world to make sense again.