Car Repair
Photo Credit: Aussiegall (Flickr.com)
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” confessed Chris. He pulled his head out from underneath the car’s hood. “I mean, I have some ideas, but I don’t really know enough about cars to say.”
The car had been lost power during his commute, and he’d barely gotten it home. It was a weird problem — the battery seemed to have no problems at low speeds, but completely went out during high speeds. If he was driving locally, the car was fine. If he was on the highway, the dashboard would go out, the air would turn off, and the car would have trouble accelerating.
“Well, take it to a mechanic,” said Alice.
“I can’t afford it,” said Chris. “I just had to replace my starter last month.”
“Charge it, then,” she said. “You’ve got to have a car. It’s not like you can get to work without one.”
She was right about that. But Chris was reluctant to tell her that his credit cards were already maxed, and that he was already worried he might have to declare bankruptcy if, God forbid, he lost his job. It wasn’t that Chris was bad with money, per se – it was just that he hadn’t slowed his spending down quickly enough, when he’d been cut back to a part-time position, and he hadn’t considered how quickly his credit card balances would shoot up.
So, he was in a precarious position now. He’d hoped it would be something simple that he could fix himself. But as he stared at the engine, schematics in hand, he realized that he had no idea of how to fix the blasted thing. He’d had to make a few repairs in the past, but they’d always been very minor things. This problem was far out of his realm of repair consciousness.
He cursed. “I hate feeling like this,” he said.
“What do you mean?” asked Alice.
“Helpless. Incompetent. Stupid,” he said. “Car repair seems like one of those basic skills everyone should have to learn. Why don’t they teach this stuff in high school?”
“They do, I think,” said Alice. “I mean, I think they did at my school, anyway.”
“Well, not at mine, and if they did, I didn’t take it,” fumed Chris. “It should have been a required class. Why don’t they make you learn stuff you actually need to know instead of stuff you don’t even care about?”
“That makes sense,” said Alice, her smile slightly wry. “Your car breaks down, and so of course it’s the educational system’s fault and not yours.”
“Don’t get all defensive,” Chris said. “Just because you’re a teacher doesn’t mean you know what’s best.”
Now Alice’s smile dropped into a dangerous frown. “I know a hell of a lot more about education than you do,” she said. “I’ve got a master’s degree. You never even finished college.”
“Right, let’s just bring that back up,” said Chris. He slammed his screwdriver down on the ground in anger. “Chris is a failure. He can’t finish anything he starts.”
“I never said that!” shouted Alice. “I never said that. All I said was that you need to finish one day.”
“Once again, because you think you know better than me!” Chris fired back. He yanked the car hood down now and stepped towards her. “If you think I’m such a failure, you fix the car!”
“Fix your own car!” Alice said. “At least I can afford to keep mine running! Maybe if you’d go get a job that didn’t require a nametag, you’d be able to keep your bills paid.”
Chris felt like he’d been sucker-punched. “That was low,” he said quietly. “You know it’s been a rough year.”
“And yet somehow, I’ve managed!” shouted Alice. “They’re cutting jobs left and right in my field, but I’ve held on!”
Chris stormed inside the house as she said it, leaving her out in the garage. She didn’t follow him in, and he assumed she’d gone home when he looked out the window a few minutes later and saw that her car was no longer there.
He felt boiled over, with no ambition to do anything but sit in front of the TV and fume. The car wasn’t getting fixed today. That much he knew. But the whole experience had been a reminder that he had plenty of other things in his life that were broken as well.
Fiction, Writing Scraps | SeanJJordan | 
April 26, 2010 11:58 pm
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