Chapter 3
chapter
three
Jude
It’s been a weird night. Emory wouldn’t, under no certain terms, stay at my house. I get it; I’m a stranger. Even if that’s not how it actually felt, we did just meet.
I helped her get Lola set up and plugged in my barn. I tried to find other reasons to stay around, just to be near her, but eventually it was obvious I was stalling so I left.
After dinner with my sisters, where they excitedly told me all about Emory and her amazing videos, I shower, then climb into bed. I lean back on the pillows against my headboard and pick up my phone.
I pull up the first video. The thumbnail has a picture of Lola and the text reads: Meet Lola: a love story .
Hey y’all!
Welcome to my channel, BeyondEmoryBoards.
She goes through the standard greeting that most people use, inviting people to subscribe and like and whatnot. I do both without even thinking about it. Despite the fact that I already saw more than two thumbnails on other videos that are clearly make-up tutorials. Whatever.
So this is Lola, my 1983 VW campervan. I thought I would give you a tour of her and let you know a little about her history. Lola and I go way back. When I was fourteen, I started working for the old man who owned the local garage in my small town. Yes, I know that technically, I wasn’t allowed to work at that age.
But old Buck is dead now so it hardly seems to matter if we fudged a few rules. I’d always been interested in the way things worked. Motors of any kind. I used to take apart things just to figure out if I could put them back together.
Sometimes I could and sometimes I just broke the darn thing.
Fuck, I’m in trouble. This woman is everything. I can’t pull my eyes off of her as she moves around the inside of her van to finally take a seat on one of the bench seats against the side wall.
Back to Buck. He said no at least three times to me when I begged him to teach me about car engines. When he finally relented, he offered to pay me in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As a kid who was used to eating in the crappy school cafeteria, this deal was amazing.
Eventually, though, he showed me around the garage. Explained all the different tools and what they did. Then, we moved on to components in the car. The ones you have to go underneath to get to, the ones under the hood and everything in between.
I loved all of it and Buck told me one night, begrudgingly I might add, that I was a natural. The summer I turned sixteen he and I started working on Lola. Well, she wasn’t Lola at the time. She was his van. He’d rescued her from a junk lot and was putting her back together, piece by piece.
I’ll never forget what he told me about why he was working on her. He said, “Emory, what you need to understand about fixing old cars, well, it’s about finding value in things other people cast aside. I was raised to believe that being wasteful is sinful. If you can bring new life to something old, you should.
So when you restore an old car, you’re not only giving new life to something other people discarded, you’re putting a piece of yourself in there too.
A restored car isn’t just a way to get from one place to another. It’s the story of all the people who owned all the cars that make up the restored car. And it’s your story too.”
A moment ago when I thought she was everything. I was wrong. She’s more than everything. Yes, she’s gorgeous, and yes, I felt an instant chemistry with her. But now that I’ve heard her talking about cars, it’s more than that. She was able to put into words something I’ve always known in my soul, but could never express. Hearing her say that cracked open something inside of me.
I watch another. Then another. Until I’m just in a loop of her voice and her gorgeous face. She does a little bit of everything. Shows basic car maintenance and educates women on what they need to do and not do if the car place is trying to upsell them on filters and whatnot.
I even watch a couple of her makeup tutorials because I am well and addicted to her now. Also, I’m pretty sure my color palette is winter, but I don’t think that information is relevant to me.
Suffice it to say, after more than two hours of scrolling and reading and watching her, I know without a doubt that this woman belongs to me.