Eli the Good by Silas House Page B

school?”
    “Yeaaaah,” he said, in his sly, slow way of dragging out one-syllable words. “She taught me that, about the gases. She was the best teacher I ever had. I always loved English and history, but she made me care about science.”
    I had heard people say such things about my mother for as long as I could remember. I thought she was very noble, to be able to make someone love a school subject they hadn’t even thought of before.
    My father often announced — out of nowhere, for no known reason — that Americans loved their cars even more than they loved their dogs. So I felt running a gas station was pretty important, too. My mother taught people how to do things, and my father took care of things that some people found impossible to learn. And during the oil shortage last year, he had supplied everyone with gas easily, even though we had seen cars lined up in the cities on the evening news.
    The best thing about the gas station, however, was that my father was a different person there. Somehow he was more relaxed there than at home. Our house, and my world, was always covered up in women. My mother, Nell, Josie, Stella, Edie. Those five were such big presences that a couple of them alone would have been overpowering enough. But here, at the Ashland station, my father was in a man’s world, and one he knew inside out. I wondered if being here reminded him of the good parts of being at war, the way men are able to trust one another and become close in ways they might not under normal circumstances. I also saw that while my father was mostly at a loss for expertise at home — often being called on only to be the middleman between Mom and Josie’s fights, or some such thing — here he was always in control. At the station he knew the answer to everything. People didn’t question him. They looked up to him. Of course we looked up to him at home, too, but usually with a seed of doubt in our throats. He was not very good at explaining himself, and we were a family that liked to have things clearly laid out for us. At the station, he and his small crew had a sort of shorthand. He could holler out a line of numbers and String would magically appear, producing a particular brake pad or oil filter.
    Daddy tried to show me things, to teach me how to change a tire or simply glance at a shiny row of sockets and know which size I needed for the job at hand. He sometimes put his oily hand atop mine to direct me in the correct way to tighten or loosen a bolt or nut. He looked me in the eye. And most of all, he talked to me. He talked to me more during one day at work together than he would have during an entire week at home.
    Still, the women made it clearly known what they wanted me to do at home, and he did not. He was vague with his demands, and there were rarely second chances. My father did not like to explain himself twice and expected me to learn how to do something after one discussion. Here I felt the need to impress and often failed. He also cussed here occasionally, which my mother would have frowned upon. She said while cussing might not send you to hell, it would make people think you were rude. When he let loose a bad word, he’d wink at me as if this was our secret. There seemed to be an understanding between us that I was not to cuss until I became a man. Only then would it be acceptable, and even then it was preferable to do this only in front of other men.
    During our lunch break, I read my book while we ate. My mother had packed our lunch. A ham-and-cheese sandwich for my father and peanut-butter-and-jelly for me. She had wrapped some Pringles up in aluminum foil for me. Daddy got us each a Zagnut bar off the counter and bought us each our own bottle of Pepsi from the machine. We sat on tires in the back corner of the garage, where it was cool and shadowy.
    “Do you have to read that old book even while you’re eating?” he said, chewing a couple of my chips.
    “It’s so good I can’t hardly lay