Sean

I am sitting in the waiting area of the mechanic's, thinking of Sean. Sean and his damn VW bug with the rear-mounted, air-cooled engine that no one has any right to attempt to drive in the Phoenix heat. I can still hear my dad cursing that car which seemed perennially scattered in his father's driveway.

Sean, I think, looked up to my father the same way I did, saw his busted knuckles as a badge of honor, the result of a victorious tussle with a carburetor, alternator, or some other mysterious and probably dirty car part ending in -ator. I was a little jealous of Sean, consulting with my dad, the sage of all things mechanical, working side by side, bonding with him in a way I never could, bleeding and cussing and finally, triumphantly, making the damn thing WORK!

From the day my dad taught me how to clean a carburetor, (I think I was five), I have been hooked on muscle cars and gearheads, like my dad. He smelled of grease and gas and WD-40, black grime in the whorls of his fingertips, burns and divots on his stubby plump fingers. When he'd clean up, he'd carefully scrub his hands to the elbows like a surgeon, studiously comb his hair into place after a shower, emerging smelling of Brute and hairspray. Sean was a young, blonde version of him with tousled hair, a smear of grease on his forearm, but most importantly fluent in the language of car.

And, oh, what a crush I had on him. My ears pricked up like a bird dog's every time my dad mentioned his name. Usually "Sean" and "that damn car" appeared in the same sentence. I never understood about that car anyway. It seemed so un-Sean-like, seemed like he needed something more muscular, like a Nova or a Chevelle. I'd say something more reliable, but the bug very reliably sat.

And now Sean sits, or lies more specifically, perhaps yet in a hospital bed, waiting for a surgeon to harvest his organs, much like he would have pulled a part from a dead car in a junkyard to give life to another. More likely this has already occurred and he is lying in the morgue while someone else is living for him, because of him, a life he no longer wanted.

Hard to say why, but I think he came upon a problem he didn't know how to fix. I think he should have called another mechanic.