16. Dean
DEAN
T he next time I show up at the shop for my shift, I feel like I’ve been given a new lease on life. Rick gives me some mild shit over how the cops came to interview him, then slaps me on the shoulder and reminds me in a fake-stern voice to stay out of trouble.
“I always stay out of trouble,” I tell him with a smirk.
“I know you do,” he says with another deep laugh, his eyes twinkling. He’s been in trouble when he was a kid. Thank fuck he has a soft spot for me.
What I have today is a full list of projects out ahead of me. Some of them are as simple as oil changes. There’s a decent job for you. You start with dirty oil and end up with clean oil.
But mostly I fix broken things at this job. It reminds me every time I’m here that if you really try, you can fix broken people, too.
It’s not usually as simple with people. Can’t swap out old parts for new ones. Can’t replace dirty oil with clean. But you can take a good look at the parts that aren’t working and shine them up until they do.
Mostly, anyway. At least I fucking hope you can. I don’t want to be broken anymore.
“Are you going to be at the bar tonight?” Seth, another one of the guys at the shop, nudges me on his way past, a rag in his hands and his hat pushed back on his head. “I was thinking about trying that place out. I figure it must be good.”
“It’s just a bar. Nothing fancy.”
“Yeah, but you always talk about it, and you’re picky.”
“Me?” I point at my chest. “You think I’m picky?”
“I think you know what you like. And you like that bar. Mind if I come along, or is it supposed to be a secret?”
“You can go wherever you want.” I feel myself getting defensive, like he’s trying to pry into my life, but he’s right. I’ve mentioned my bar quite a few times at work. If I didn’t want anyone to know I went there, I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I don’t have to do that anymore. That was a school rule, not a real-life rule. I can say whatever the hell I want to whoever I want. There’s only one thing I can’t say, and it has nothing to do with the bar. “But I’d like to see you over there sometime. You like burgers?”
He laughs. “Who the hell doesn’t like burgers?”
I shrug, “You never know.”
“Yeah. I can get behind a good burger, especially when they have decent beers on tap.”
“It’s a bar, so they’ve got lots of shit on tap.”
“Good.” He knocks his hand against my shoulder. “I’ll look for you. What time do you think you’ll be there?”
I tell him what time I’m planning to head out and give him an estimate on when I’ll be at my barstool. “I’m usually there at the same time most nights, so I’m easy to find.”
“I know.” My stomach drops. For a few seconds, it doesn’t come back up. He knows I’m easy to find? What the hell else does this guy know about me? What does he think he knows? “It’s okay, man. Don’t look so freaked out. You live next door. Everybody knows that.”
“Right.”
“Right,” he repeats. “You live next door, and you’ve never even asked us over for a game of cards.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to play cards.”
“Where else would we play? The office?”
“You could if you wanted to.”
Seth gestures around the rest of the shop. “This is work. Not everything can happen here. Haven’t you ever heard of a work-life balance?”
“I don’t sit at a desk all day, so no.”
“I bet you have more chairs in your house.” He leans in and gives me a look. “I bet you also have a bigger fridge, which could fit more beer. And if you were really feeling friendly, you could order a pizza, and we could eat it while we played cards.”
“Sounds like you’re inviting yourself over.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. What do you say? Next Friday? Or do you only socialize at the bar?”
“Next Friday’s fine,” I tell him, mostly uneasy but at the same time, curious. I wonder if the boss put him up to this. To make me feel like I’m part of the family, as he likes to call it.
“I’ll let the rest of the guys know.”
I like the guys at the shop well enough—if I didn’t, I wouldn’t work here—but I guess I’ve never thought much about whether they liked me back.
I work through a complicated repair on a new-ish car—the news ones are always the worst because they have computer chips and all kinds of other bullshit built in—and then a simple repair on an old car. I take a break for lunch and go back at it, knocking two more repairs off the list.
“I’m going to make you employee of the month,” Rick shouts over the whine of a drill. “Put your picture on the wall and everything.”
“Hey,” Seth calls from the other side of the shop. “What about me? I’ve been here longer.”
“You’re not as good,” Rick answers.
“Hey, fuck you.”
“Watch your mouth in my repair shop.”
They both laugh at each other.
It doesn’t come up again. We get a few more cars in toward the early afternoon. I let Rick know I’ll stay a little later so we’re not swamped in the morning. It just feels like the right thing to do, and it keeps feeling that way.
I’ve come pretty far.
I owe that to my girl. Even when my head is fuzzy with the other things, I know she’s there for me. She’s the one who keeps being there for me.
My girlfriend showed me that we don’t have to stay there forever. We existed before we got sent away. We exist now. Everything that happened in the middle is just part of us. It’s not all of us.
I think about that for a while I’m bent over the next car on the list.
“Hey, Aden.”
I pick my head up and almost bang it on the hood, my heart in my throat. I lose sight of the engine for a few beats.
The memories are right there in front of me like they never stopped. I can feel their hands on my arms and their feet coming down on my knuckles and how almost every part of me throbbed even when I was laying in bed. I can smell the bleach in the bathrooms and the overcooked meat in the lunchroom and blood drying on my skin.
All the feelings come back, too. The heaviest despair I’ve ever felt. A hopelessness that went so deep I thought about dying every day. A place like Rick’s shop seemed impossible to me when I was lying on a concrete floor, having my hands broken into a million pieces. A house of my own? That was never going to happen.
The torture I went through becomes one long memory that’s filled with pain and screaming and worthlessness. It gets so loud that the shop fades away.
What the fuck. No one’s called me Aden in years. No one but her. My Haley. My girlfriend. Only when she needs me to be Aden. When that part of me has to come out.
I didn’t make it up. My friend Nathan, who I used to see all the time at the bar, is leaning in through one of the garage’s doors out front. It’s been fucking years since I’ve seen him. Since that first year I found her.
None of the other guys seem to have noticed anything happening with me. They’re still going about their business.
Fuck. That was close. If it never happened again, I’d be glad.
Nathan lifts his hand. “Hey! How you doing? Saw this place was open and decided to stop by. I’m back in town. Am I interrupting?”
“No, I’m good. Good to see you man. Just let me—” I grab the nearest rag and wipe at my hands while I go across to him. It’s too loud in the shop to carry on a conversation, and I need those few seconds to collect myself. My heart’s going way too fast. It slows down as we step outside into the fresh air. I take my hat off and let the breeze blow through my hair. The fresh air settles me down some more. So do the sounds coming from the shop. “Next time—I don’t know if you forgot, but I don’t go by that name anymore.”
“Oh, shit, right.” He claps my shoulder. “Sorry, man. It was for therapy, right? The fuck was that called again?.”
“Yeah. An anagram. I know it probably doesn’t seem?—”
“Nah. My fault. I won’t screw it up again.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine.” I’m relieved, though. I tried to be Aden for a little while. I wanted to leave all this shit in the past. And then Haley got an idea. It was Haley's plan.
I thought people might give me shit when I started going by another name, but they didn’t. They know what I went through. Honestly, they know too much.
Nathan gives me a once-over. He doesn’t look concerned, exactly, but he does look...interested. Like he cares about how I’m doing. It’s not because he knows what I’ve been doing. The plan Haley had. I have to tell myself that over and over again. People aren’t looking at me because they’re suspicious, or because they want to get me in trouble for looking back.
Or because they know I have that thing with my head. They don’t know that part. Haley said to keep it a secret.
They’re just looking.
That’s what people do when they haven’t had rule number one punched into them so many times it’ll never leave.
“Honestly, man, I’m happy for you. The name thing seems like a decent way to—” Nathan waves his hand. “You know. Dean, Dean, Dean. I got you man.”
I let out a laugh, like it doesn’t do things to me, to hear that name.
“It helps compartmentalize, you know? Keeps things separate.” He changes the subject and rattles on about being back in town and needing a job. I let it all go. I leave all the thoughts that creep up to sit there and wait. Wait for Haley. She’ll fix this feeling inside of me.
She always does. I’m glad she found me. I didn’t know how to find her, but she was able to find me.