Changes
Driving back into town for the holiday weekend, he peeled the sticker from his car windshield, the one that said when his next oil change would be due. He knew if his Daddy saw it, he would blow a gasket. To pay someone else to change your oil? You may as well take off your balls and hand them over. His daddy wouldn’t understand any argument he would make, how he didn’t have the garage space where he lived now, how it made more sense to pay someone to do that job quickly, how it freed you up to do other things. “Sure,” he could hear his Daddy say, “Might as well pay someone to fuck your girlfriend then too. Saves time.”
Daddy definitely wouldn’t understand any argument about money, not after considering how much he had spent on racing at Bowman Gray over the years. In the economics of the family, money had little to do with cars. But mostly, he wouldn’t understand handing such a task over to a stranger. It would be all right to have a family member, friend, maybe even someone you work with do it, because you knew them. You could trust them, and there was a sense of responsibility to one another. But you wouldn’t have some stranger stick their hands up under your car any more than you would let them stick their hands in your pants. In fact, that would be more understandable considering the amount of affairs in the family and Uncle Seb’s fondness for prostitutes or for women who, for all practical purposes regarding the exchange of sex for valuables, were indistinguishable from prostitutes. For Daddy an anonymous 10 minute quickie would be more understandable than a 10 minute oil change.
He probably hadn’t even been ten when Daddy had him loosening oil pans and changing filters. That had been one of his regular family chores for years. Then he had moved on from the family cars to the team cars, as part of getting them ready to race. Which also made what he was doing a kind of a betrayal. He could do it, he could find the time to do it, he could find the space — the garage excuse was a lie — but he just didn’t feel like it. That would be the part Daddy wouldn’t understand.
And he knew Daddy expected him to come racing this weekend, as he did whenever he came home, and that he should want to. And he wanted to want to, but he didn’t. He had loved growing up in The Madhouse. He had loved the community. He had loved the engine noise, the smell of rubber and gas and hot metal. But he didn’t any more. He just didn’t feel like going there every time he came home. You may love barbecue, but that didn’t mean you wanted to eat it all the time. Except, he did love barbecue and he did eat it all the time. So maybe he didn’t love Bowman Gray as much as he thought. He loved it for his Daddy. Just like he loved to eat some foods with his daddy, but he didn’t feel the same way about it.
But he knew the real question wasn’t why he didn’t tell his Daddy this. If he said he wasn’t going, he knew there would be a moment of silence and then Daddy would deal with it like he dealt with most things, he would shrug and say “Okay,” and turn away, hurt but acting like he wasn’t; no, the real question was when he knew Daddy was going to say, “Let’s change your oil while you’re here,” and he would say what he always said, which was, “Yeah,” when he knew they would be changing the oil this weekend – and he had known for a while he was coming down — why had he paid for an oil change last week? Why had he literally just gotten it done? He couldn’t answer that, or he didn’t want to. That was some therapist shit. Oedipus in a quart of oil. And even that still wasn’t the real question.
As he drove, he rolled the sticker between his fingers, making it smaller and smaller. The real question was whether he would ever talk to Daddy and change his mind about who he was.
Not this trip.
He went to flick the sticker out the window, reconsidered, looked around car interior, then put it in his mouth and swallowed it.
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published Bleachers: 54 linked fictions and several collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance.