Staring out the window and watching the man fix our car; I
tried very hard not to be attracted. "He's your type," my mom had said before
giving me the number to a local mechanic, "he has a thick accent. As a matter
of fact, I never have any idea what he's saying." Very funny! Just because most
of the men that turn my crank have accents or otherwise unique-sounding voices,
doesn't mean I'm going fall for it every time.
So as I stood watching this very black man tinker under the
hood of our car that wouldn't start, I told myself that he was too short,
hadn't even made eye contact when we met and had an accent too thick for even me to muddle through. Besides, he
mumbled. But as I watched him look expertly at the foreign bits and pieces that
should have been making our car run, I couldn't help but notice how masculine
his grease-stained coveralls looked, or how the orange knit hat he wore brought
out the red in his dark skin. I was
tickled by how comfortable he looked while manipulating plugs and wires and
other metal curiosities.
As he headed toward our door, I quickly pinched my cheeks
hoping to put a little bit of pretty into my rather plain, extremely white,
face. After a few minutes of guessing at his words incorrectly and attempting
to make eye contact, I understood that he would have to run into town to get a
few parts, and that I could reimburse him once he got the car running. It would
cost all I had left, but I wasn't too worried about that since I lived with my
mom and my kids were off visiting my sister. I didn't need much money anyway.
After the mechanic left, I started making dinner for my
brothers and allowed myself to go back to missing my own boys. I was twenty-three
and living with my mom. I was the single
mom of three ridiculously adorable boys, and this was my first stint without them. It had been a struggle not to phone my sister every ten minutes. She'd begged to
keep them overnight, and my mom had needed to take a trip to Houston (three
hours from our home, and where my sister was living) anyway, so it would be
perfect! I agreed with mixed feelings. It's always good to have a short break
from your kids when they are very little, and it's even more wonderful if they
get to connect with an aunt who loves them during that break, but being without
my kids, for me, meant not knowing who to be.
Not that staying home with my brothers didn't give me anything to do! All four of my brothers were on the spectrum of autism when they were adopted, and on that day two were still quite autistic, while the other two had come off the spectrum only to become struggling teenagers. So it was in this environment of missing my kids, feeling at once overwhelmed by and proud of my brothers, and slightly like a failed woman who still lives with her mom, that I met a sexy, accented, and single mechanic.
I heard his truck coming up the driveway before I saw it,
and headed quickly into the bathroom to put Vaseline on my lips. I haven't worn
make-up since my teen years and so making my lips shiny and pinching my cheeks was
the best I could do in an attempt to get 'dolled up'.
Not that the mechanic seemed to notice. He just got straight
to fixing our car, and once it started purring again, he came to the door to
show me a break-down of what each part cost, along with what he expected in
labor fees, and handed me the scrap paper he had written it all down on. Our
first love note! Math!
I explained that I would have to head into town and find an
ATM machine in order to give him his money, and so he gave me directions to his
house and I agreed to meet him there.
So now I was still missing my kids, feeling slightly
overwhelmed and proud of my brothers, and like a failed woman who lived with
her mom, add to that I couldn't help but feel slightly uninteresting and
unattractive! Not only had the mechanic not flirted back, but he wouldn't even
look in my eyes or relax and let conversation flow comfortably. And on top of
all that, my mom had been right! I was
attracted to the mechanic! How annoying to have a mom that knows you so well!
By the time I reached the mechanic's street I'd noticed that
the car, though now running, didn't seem to have the pick-up I was used to. I
vowed to at least be grown-up enough to mention the problem to him (rather than
stay quiet and tell my mom later, which was a habit of mine), hopefully
redeeming myself at least a little in my own eyes.
I found the house without incident. He had said it would be
the one with all of the cars in the lawn, and he wasn't kidding! There were
cars, car parts, tools, and tires all over the yard. As I pulled into the
driveway I saw the mechanic come out of a small rundown trailer. He was still
wearing the orange hat but had pulled the top part of his coveralls down and
tied the arms around his waist. The blue t-shirt he wore showed off his strong,
dark arms and I could feel my body flutter. Accents are sexy to me, but arms
are my Achilles heel. Man, I wished he would look at me!
I pulled out the money and handed it over. He still wouldn't
look at me, but I could tell that he was more comfortable here among his own
stuff. I mentioned the problem with the car's pick-up and he said something
about a fuel filter. He offered to fix it for free right then and there if I
had the time.
"My kids are in Houston with my sister, so take all the time
you need. When I go home it just makes me miss them more."
For a moment, he looked at me. Not true eye contact, but he
actually looked at me. I fluttered. "You have kids?" he asked.
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