“…it said, Give the boy the Buick. He has always taken care of it.” Adaeze pressed her lips together to keep them from shaking. “I read it standing in the hospital hallway. Then I called my brothers in Atlanta and Chicago and read it to them over the phone. Nobody argued. Chidi said, Of course. Emeka said, Daddy told us years ago he was watching the boy wash it.” Mateo slowly uncurled his fingers. In his palm lay a single brass key on a worn leather loop, the old kind with a square head, and folded around it was a pink slip of paper. The title to the car, signed on the back in the slow, careful hand of a blind man.
Mateo stared at it. He did not say anything for such a long time that I began to worry. Then he said, in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it, “Mama, he gave me the Buick.” I knelt on the driveway gravel beside the open car door. “Mijo, he gave you more than the Buick,” I said. “He gave you the thing he loved most. And he gave it to you because you loved it the same way he did.” Mateo bent over the steering wheel of our ugly old car and wept so hard that his shoulders shook, and Adaeze put her hand on his back and left it there, like a mother would.
Adaeze told us the rest while we sat on our front step, the three of us, with the can of wax in the middle. Her father arrived from Lagos in 1979 with two suitcases and a letter of introduction. He took the first job he could find, carrying mail, and he bought the cream colored Buick in 1989, the year he became a citizen. It was his proof that he belonged. When his wife Grace died, he stopped driving, because he said the passenger seat looked too empty. But every Saturday, he sat on the porch and looked at the car, because it was the last thing that still shone.
A ten year old can of wax on a doorstep hid a brass key and a sentence that said the boy had always taken care of it.
“I was angry with him, you know,” Adaeze said, wiping her eyes. “I thought he was lonely and proud and stubborn. I begged him to come live with me in Houston. He said, Adaeze, I have a boy next door who washes my car. Why would I leave?” She laughed, and the laugh broke. “For ten years I thought it was a joke. It was not. That was the reason he stayed.”
Mateo looked up. His face was red and wet, but there was something steady in it that I had not seen before, a kind of quiet. “I thought he did not like it,” he said. “The first day, with the dish soap.” Adaeze shook her head. “He told me that was the best day of his year.”
Over the next week, the family came to Fresno, Chidi and Emeka and a sister I had not known existed, and we cooked a long Sunday dinner in the house next door. Jollof rice, fried plantains, the smell of pepper soup drifting out to the yard. Mateo sat at the end of the table in a clean white shirt. Emeka, who was six foot four and quiet as a monk, set his hand on the back of the chair of my son and said, “Our father wrote about you in his letters. We never met you, but we feel we know you.” Mateo went red to his ears. In the evening, they all came out to the driveway, and Mateo started the engine.
It caught on the second turn, with a throaty cough and then a smooth, low purr. Nobody had heard that engine in years. The whole family stood in a half circle in the driveway while Mateo backed the car slowly out onto the street, cream colored in the last of the sunlight, the chrome gleaming like new. Chidi put a hand over his mouth. Adaeze said something in Igbo, and the others answered, softly, and I understood without translation that it was a blessing. Mateo drove down the block and back, the way you test a new pair of shoes, and when he parked, he sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel.
He opened the glove box. Inside were the ten dollar bills, all ten of them, which he had been keeping in a rubber band. He laid them on the dashboard, one by one, and then he took out a pen and wrote on the back of the last one: Thank you, Mr. Okafor. The next morning he drove to Fresno City College and enrolled in the automotive program. He told me, sheepishly, that he wanted to learn how to rebuild engines, so that the Buick would never have to be sold. I said that I had always known my son would end up with grease under his nails. He said, “Clean is free, Mama. Grease is optional.”
These days, on Saturday mornings, I hear the hose. I step onto the porch with my coffee and watch Mateo washing the Buick in the driveway, as he has done since he was seven. Only now he drives it to the cemetery afterward. He parks beside a small headstone, with a little flag and a bunch of marigolds, and he sits on the hood for an hour in the sun. He does not say much. He told me once that he just wants the old man to see it shining. I believe that he does. I believe it with all my heart.
Last month, Mateo took me for a drive. It was my first ride in the Buick, and I sat in the passenger seat with my hands in my lap, surrounded by the smell of old leather and lemon wax. We went out past the vineyards, past the packing house where I spent twenty years sorting raisins. I rolled down my window and let the wind blow my hair. I thought about a boy of seven who asked why our car was so ugly, and I thought about what I told him. Clean is free. I had been right, but not in the way I meant. Clean was free, and it had been worth a Buick.
