The old woman in her Sunday best walked down the center aisle of the funeral home on the arm of a grown grandson, in a lavender dress with a hat to match, a white glove on each hand. She carried a rusted car key on a thin chain, worn dark, with a leather tag. She stopped at the casket of my uncle Gus, bent slowly, and pressed the key into his hand. Then she straightened and turned to my father, who stood in the first row with his arms crossed. “Sir,” she said, in a voice as steady as a church bell, “my name is Odessa Perkins. Your brother fixed my car for forty one years. I came to give him back the key.”
My father, Walter, did not uncross his arms. He had told the whole family that Gus wasted his life under the hoods of other people, that he could have been a foreman at the plant, that he died with nothing but a garage and a cat. “In 1983 the Buick plant let me go,” said Mrs. Perkins. “I was thirty seven, a widow, with four children. I had a 1974 Chevy with a cracked block. I could not afford to fix it. I could not afford to lose it. I walked into a garage on Dort Highway with my children in the car and my last eleven dollars in my purse.”
“Your brother looked at the engine for ten minutes. He said, Madam, this car is finished. I started to cry. And he said, But I have a car in the back that is not. He wheeled out a green Impala, newer, with a clean title. He put the key in my hand. I said, I cannot pay. He said, Pay me what you can, when you can. I said, How much? He said, One dollar. And he wrote on the receipt, paid in full.”
A rusted car key on a thin chain was pressed into the hand of a dead mechanic by an elderly woman and gave one niece the morning to bring her father back to his brother.
“I paid him one dollar on the first of every month, for eleven years, in an envelope, until the day he told me to stop. In all that time, that car never failed me. If it had a problem, he came to my house and fixed it in my driveway, in the rain, in the snow, at midnight. He would not take a cent. He said it was a lifetime warranty.” She held up the chain. “This is the key to that car. It carried me to the factory, to the church, to four graduations. The car is gone now. But I kept the key, because I could not bear to throw away the best thing a man ever did for me.”
I was forty five years old, and I had a lump in my throat I could not swallow. My father had never once said a kind word about his younger brother. Gus was the one who came to my school plays. Gus taught me to change a tire at twelve and to check my oil at fourteen. Gus gave me the down payment for my first car, in a paper bag, and said, Do not tell your daddy. All my life I had known he was good. I had not known he was a hero. I turned and looked at my father. His arms had come uncrossed.
A tall man in his fifties stood behind Mrs. Perkins, a surgeon, he said, at Hurley Medical Center. “I was twelve in 1983,” he said. “I rode in that car. My mother made me say a prayer for Mr. Gus every night. We had no money. He never once made us feel poor.” A younger woman said she was a pilot. A third, a teacher. “That car got four of us to where we are. Every mile.” They stood in a row beside their mother, three grown children in good clothes, and behind them a dozen more, grandchildren, neighbors, strangers who had sat in the passenger seat of a car that Gus had once fixed for nothing.
Odessa Perkins looked at my father steadily, with great kindness. “Sir,” she said, “I have heard that you do not think much of your brother. I have come to tell you I think he was the finest man in Flint.” My father made a noise like a man who has been struck in the stomach. He walked to the casket slowly, as if the floor were water. He looked at the key in the hand of his brother. “Gus,” he said. “I told you to go to the plant. I told you a garage was no place for a man with your hands.” His voice broke. “You had the best hands in Michigan, and you used them on people who had no one else.”
He bowed his head and wept. I had not seen my father weep since our mother passed. Mrs. Perkins laid a gloved hand on his shoulder, and he took it in both of his and held it as a drowning man holds a rope. Behind them, one by one, the people filed forward, a long line of ordinary Flint, plant workers and nurses and bus drivers, and each laid a hand on the casket and said a name, a year, a car. A transmission in 1991. A set of brakes in 2004. A battery on Christmas Eve. I counted three hundred before I stopped counting.
The family held the lunch at the garage. My father unlocked the big bay doors himself and swept the floor, which was already clean. The tools hung on the wall in their outlines, each in its place, just as Gus had left them. On the workbench lay a stack of paid in full receipts, thousands of them, held with rubber bands. Beside them was a cigar box, and in the box a tidy row of envelopes, each with a dollar bill inside and a date, and the handwriting of Odessa Perkins on every front. He had saved every single one.
My father and I reopened the shop in the spring. We call it the Gus Garage. On the first Friday of every month we fix a car for a single mother, free of charge, and the receipt always says the same thing, paid in full. Mrs. Perkins comes by each month with a dollar in an envelope, to keep up the tradition, and my father takes it with a straight face and puts it in the cigar box. He says it is the best money the shop ever made.
