The Unlikely Spanner

My husband is thirty-eight years old and on the last Saturday of June he was doing forty miles an hour around a dirt oval at the Old Mill Fairgrounds with a grin on his face so wide it made my chest hurt, and I stood behind the fence in the sun hating him a little for it, which is a terrible thing to admit but there it is.

Let me back up. My name is Jamila Gerrard, I am thirty-six, and for the last eleven years I have made my living sitting in a beige office asking couples what they think their partner is feeling right now. I am good at it. People cry in my office and I hand them tissues and I never cry myself, and I go home at five fifteen, and I eat what Ben cooks, and I go to bed at ten thirty, and if you asked me to name one spontaneous thing I have done since our honeymoon I would need a very long pause to answer you.

Ben does not have this problem. Ben runs a one-man private investigation agency out of the spare room of our house, which means his office hours are whatever he feels like, and on weekends he races vintage go-karts with a club full of men his age and older who all wear the same kind of hat. He has been asking me to come watch a race for maybe six years, and for six years I have said something sensible like I have files to review, or it is going to be hot out there, and every time he said okay in this flat voice that I always pretended I did not hear properly.

This year I heard it. So on the last Saturday of June I drove out to the fairgrounds with a folding chair and a bottle of water and I sat in the sun and watched my husband of twelve years put on a helmet.

I want to describe it properly because I keep coming back to it. There were nine karts on that little dirt oval, most of them older than me, all of them sputtering and popping like they were angry about being alive, and when the flag dropped the noise was enormous and ugly and wonderful. Ben started fifth. By the second lap he was third. By the fifth lap he was glued to the bumper of a red kart driven by some retired postman, and the two of them went around and around trading paint, and I discovered I was standing up. I did not remember standing up. My chair was sitting there empty behind me and I was gripping the top rail of the fence with both hands like the fence was going somewhere.

On the last lap Ben went around the outside of the red kart in the dusty corner, which I am told is the hard way around, and he took the lead and held it, and when he rolled to a stop and pulled off his helmet his hair was plastered flat and his face was red and he had the widest, stupidest, most beautiful grin I have ever seen on a grown man.

And the feeling that went through me was not pride. I mean, it was pride, some of it, but underneath the pride there was this sharp little pang, like envy almost, and I did not understand it at first. I stood there while he parked the kart and took his trophy, which was a plastic cup spray painted gold, and I thought, he knows how to do this. He knows how to want something and go do it badly and loudly in public and not care who sees him sweating. I could not remember the last time I had done anything badly and loudly. I do everything well and quietly. It is my whole personality. It is exhausting.

He came over to the fence still wearing the grin, and he held up the cup.

"Third race win this season," he said. "You witnessed it. No takebacks."

"I witnessed it," I said. "You almost went into the tire wall on the second corner."

"That was intentional. That was called a drift."

"That was called almost dying in front of your wife."

"Same thing," he said, and he leaned over the fence and kissed me, and he smelled like gasoline and sweat and sun, and I thought, this man is happy and I used to be this happy and somewhere along the way I became the sensible one and I never got voted in, it just happened.

I am going to be honest with myself on this page even if I am never honest in my office, which is ironic. I envied him. That was the pang. I stood at that fence watching a thirty-eight year old man in a paper-mache helmet and I wanted what he had, and I did not know how to get it, and the drive home was very quiet even though we were both in the car.

Now, the second part of this, the part that actually changed things, starts two weeks later.

We own a building. I should explain that. When Ben's uncle retired from the plumbing supply business about nine years back he sold us his old warehouse on the river side of town for next to nothing, and we have been paying it off ever since, and Ben uses the back half as a garage where he keeps the karts and a truly upsetting number of tools, and the front half is mostly shelving with dead inventory on it and dust you could write your name in. It is the kind of place where you go in and something is always dripping.

I went in there on a Tuesday evening in July while Ben was out at the track practicing, because I had a plan forming, and my plans usually stay in my head where they are safe, but this one had legs.

Here is how it happened. There is a rotary lawn mower sitting in the corner of that warehouse, an old thing with a rusted deck, that came with the building the way furniture comes with an apartment. It has been there since before we owned the place. Ben has threatened to scrap it about forty times and never has, and a week earlier I had watched a video on my phone, one of those restoration videos where some patient soul takes a seized engine apart down to every last bolt and cleans it and puts it back and it roars to life, and I had watched it twice, and then a third time, and then I had paused it on a shot of the crankcase and thought, I could do that. Not well. Not fast. But the engine was right there, and the tools were right there, and nobody was watching me.

So on that Tuesday I put on one of Ben's old work shirts out of the donation box, and I dragged a shop light over to the corner, and I got down on the concrete with the video pulled up on my phone and I started unbolting things.

I will not pretend I knew what I was doing, because I did not. The first bolt I attacked I turned the wrong way for a solid minute before I figured that out, and when the shroud came off the flywheel there was a dead mouse nest under it and I sat back on my heels and said a bad word out loud in an empty warehouse, which felt, oddly, fantastic. I said it again just because I could. Nobody has heard Jamila Gerrard say that word since grad school.

The engine was a mess. Every fastener was rusted, the pull cord had rotted to fuzz, the carburetor looked like something from a tide pool, and the more I took apart the more I found underneath it, and I loved it. I want to be precise about that word because it surprised me. I sat on that dusty floor for two and a half hours with rust in my hair and a stripped screw driver and I did not check the time once, which has not happened to me since before I had a license to practice.

By the time I quit for the night I had the shroud off, the flywheel nut broken loose, the air filter housing in a shoebox lid sorted by size, and a list of parts written on the back of a client intake form, which I threw out and rewrote on a proper piece of paper because I am not an animal.

I cleaned up, put everything back so it would not look suspicious, and drove home, and Ben was in the kitchen making his Tuesday pasta, and he said, "Good session day?" and I said, "Long one," and I kissed him and set the table, and he did not look at me twice, and I sat there eating pasta knowing a secret, and I have to tell you, at thirty-six, it was the most alive I had felt in years.

The secret lasted four days.

It would have lasted longer if I had been better at washing my face. On Friday evening I came in the back door from the warehouse a little late, and I had checked myself in the truck mirror, or I thought I had, but there was a smear of grease across my cheekbone that I had missed, and Ben was standing at the sink rinsing lettuce, and he turned around and stopped, with the lettuce dripping in his hands, and looked at me.

"You've got grease on your face," he said.

"Do I?" I said, going for casual, and I have never once in twelve years of marriage managed casual, so it came out like a squeak.

"Jamila." He set the lettuce down. "That's engine grease. That's not, that's a specific grease. That's the black stinky grease that's only in one place in our life."

I stood there in the doorway with my keys still in my hand, and I could have lied, I actually run a practice where I teach people to stop lying to their spouses, so you would think I would have better material, but what came out was, "It's the mower."

"The mower," he said.

"The one in the corner. The rusted one you keep threatening to scrap."

And then he crossed the kitchen in about three steps and took my face in both hands and kissed me, hard, right there with the lettuce running water onto the counter, and I grabbed the front of his shirt because my knees did something unplanned. When he pulled back he was grinning like a fool, that same grin from the podium at the fairgrounds with his spray-painted cup.

"You took apart the mower," he said, and his voice had gone a little rough. "You, Jamila Gerrard, sensible Jamila, sat on the warehouse floor and took apart a Briggs engine."

"I didn't finish," I said. "And I turned a bolt the wrong way for a whole minute, and there was a dead mouse nest under the flywheel shroud, and I said a bad word."

"You said a bad word." He was laughing now, holding my elbows. "What word?"

"That's between me and the warehouse."

"Oh my god!" He kissed me again, shorter this time, and then rested his forehead against mine, and for a second neither of us said anything at all, and I could feel him trying not to make it a big emotional thing because he knows I bolt from big emotional things, and then he said, "How long have you been going out there?"

"Since Tuesday. Tonight makes four times."

"Four times and I had no idea." He shook his head slowly. "Do you know how long I've wanted you to want something like this? Six years I've been asking you to come watch a race. Six years. And you just went and did it yourself, in secret, in my garage."

"It's our garage."

"It's your garage now," he said, and I felt that sentence land somewhere in my chest and stay there.

After that he was insufferable, in the way I love. He did not hover, exactly, but every night he would ask one question and then physically restrain himself from answering it, which for Ben is a heroic act. What surprised me most was that he never once took over. I expected it, honestly, I had a whole speech ready about how if he grabbed the wrench out of my hand I would scream, and he never did it. He would stand with his hands in his pockets and wait until I asked.

The carburetor was where I hit my wall. I got the whole thing apart fine, and I soaked the little parts in a coffee can of cleaner I bought at the parts store, where a young man behind the counter looked at my list, which was organized with subheadings, and said, "Wow, okay," which I chose to take as a compliment. But putting it back together, that was different, because there is a float, and a needle, and a gasket that only sits one way, and a little jet that I dropped and spent twenty minutes finding in the dust with the shop light, and by the third evening of it I was sitting on the floor nearly in tears, which is not like me, or it is exactly like me in my beige office and never anywhere else.

Ben came in with two bottles of beer, handed me one, and sat down cross-legged on the concrete next to me without saying anything for a minute.

"It's the float height," I said finally. "I think. Or the needle seat. Or everything."

"Show me your hands," he said, and I put them out, and he took them, and he did not take the wrench, he took my hands, and he turned them over and looked at the grease in the lines of my palms like he was reading them, and then he laced his fingers through mine and did not let go, and we sat there longer than we needed to, his thumb moving slow over the back of my hand, and I could feel the callus on his thumb from the kart wheel, and my heart was doing something I would describe as unprofessional.

"Okay," he said, when he finally let go, and his voice was not quite steady, which did something to my whole evening. "Show me where you are. Talk me through it, and I'll just tell you