It started Thursday morning on the first try. That truck has never once started on the first try with anybody watching, so naturally nobody was.
Sarah wrote that I would never call it finished. She is right about that. So I called it running, which it was, and put the Bustelo can, a roll of wire and a jug of water on the passenger floorboard, and we went.
An hour and a half down to the lake at about fifty miles an hour. The temperature needle sat where it always sits. The brakes did what they do, which is eventually. Sarah held her coffee with both hands the whole way and did not say one word about it, which is how I knew she was nervous.
The Meg was waiting at the edge of the lot like she had planned the whole thing, which she had. Race week, so the place was full. Rows of cars with paint you could see your face in, chrome nobody had ever gotten a fingerprint on. Parked the '54 at the end of a row next to something red and low and got out ready to stand there and be the question mark.
That is not what happened.
Older men started drifting over inside of ten minutes. They walked right past the red car. One had a '53 his daddy drove to the mill for twenty years. One wanted to know if the paint on the cab was original, and when I told him it was, he put his hand flat on the roof like he was checking it for a fever. They talked about rust the way some people talk about a résumé. Not one of them asked when it would be done.
The Meg took pictures of their faces for Ella Mae, as ordered.
Then it would not start to leave. Of course it would not. Hood up under the lot lights, three men I had known for about an hour holding their phones over the engine, and it was a loose wire at the coil, same as it has been every time it has done this. Ten minutes with the can and the roll of wire. It caught. Somebody clapped. One of the three said that was the most fun he had all night, and I believe he meant it.
Drove home in the dark. Sarah was asleep before we were off the lake roads.
Five years I have kept that truck in the garage waiting on ready. Turns out ready was never what anybody came to see.