By the time we got there it was late in the morning and my father couldn’t do breakfast anymore. I arranged to come in and pick him up after work, then I wandered around town by myself for half an hour and bought an espresso. I was about to get a cab from the small taxi stand in Old Town when two dark vehicles caught my attention. A hearse and a town car, both bearing the name of a funeral home in gold lettering on their sides. The hearse carried a pale brown coffin and the town car had only one passenger, a man in a dark suit with a rosebud pinned to his lapel. He sat in the back of the car looking straight ahead. I had not expected that Bill Prentice would be solitary for this occasion. He was well known and gregarious and he’d been that way for a long time. When I thought of the kind of funeral procession that might attend his wife I thought of a long train of cars, elaborate wreaths, parties of people for whom he had done favors or been in business with. I thought of an event.
But there was nothing of this about the two lonely cars that passed me. They seemed closed and inward-facing, as though the thing they carried was not to be shared and they wished to pass from view as quickly as possible. I watched them as they moved along the road, their brake lights occasionally flicking red as they slowed for traffic or waited at signals. And then they turned a corner and were gone.
I hadn’t been at home long when Rachel, the manager of the garden center, dropped Stan off in front of the house. He came down the hall and into the kitchen all breathless and full of news.
“Bill closed the garden center.”
“Yeah, I think it was Pat’s funeral today.”
“No, I mean forever. When I got in Rachel was giving everyone their last paychecks and telling us not to come back. Bill’s so sad he’s not going to open it again. He’s not even going to live at his house anymore. He’s gone up to his cabin in the mountains. Rachel said he sold all his furniture.”
“Ah, man, your job…”
“No, Johnny, it’s good. Now we can go full power on Plantasaurus. And guess what? Rachel told me that Bill said I could take all the big plants to help me start, and all the sacks of potting mix too. It’s a reward for the bear.”
Stan went to the refrigerator and got a can of Coke.
“You should cut down on that stuff. It isn’t good for you.”
“What are you talking about, Johnny? It powers you up.”
“It’s full of sugar.”
“Of course it is.” He took a big swallow of the drink and made a growling noise. “Powerin’ up for Plantasaurus!”
Drinking so fast made his eyes water. He blinked rapidly and burped.
I told him about the crash that morning. He went wide-eyed at the story of our narrow escape and then seemed to withdraw into himself. Later, he went upstairs to his room and put on his Batman costume and sat down at his desk with his comic books and his drawing things.
Stan and I met my father at the garage in town. Oakridge had three of these places but, by chance, the Ford had been taken to the one that used to belong to Gareth’s father. The place had been bought and expanded by a nationwide chain and was now run as a franchise by staff who all wore matching uniforms. A short, fat mechanic carrying a clipboard joined us in the workshop. He moved slowly, as though the weight of the fat dragging at his body exhausted him.
“She’s up there.”
He jerked his head at a hydraulic hoist, then took a flashlight out of his pocket and shone it on the underside of my father’s car. The damage was extensive. The exhaust system had been torn away and the drive shaft was no longer connected to the differential. The base of the car itself was scraped and gouged and marked in places with powdered concrete.
“Brake failure.”
Using the flashlight beam he traced a thin metal pipe that came out from somewhere in the engine and ran along its base before splitting out to feed the brakes on each side of the car. Where the pipe bent to curve around the engine it looked discolored and corroded.
“Someone hold the flashlight.”
I took it from him and held it trained on the spot while he went to work with a pair of wire cutters. When he was done he stepped out from under the car and held his hand out to us. A six-inch section of the pipe rested on his palm. The metal on one side of it had rotted away leaving a hole in the pipe wall about two inches long. My father took it and examined it closely. His face was tight with anger and he shook his head slowly.
“Unbelievable.”
The mechanic snorted derisively. “Yeah, it’s pretty poor. Looks like some sort of metal fatigue.”
“But these things aren’t supposed to corrode.”
“What can I say? You got a defective part. This is a reasonably old car.”
“It’s only a ’93.”
“Yeah.”
My father passed the pipe to me. I passed it on to Stan who muttered under his breath, “Unbelievable.”
The mechanic picked up his clipboard and ran his finger down a list of handwritten entries on the top sheet of a pad of printed yellow forms.
“Your car’s written off. Rear axle, diff, drive shaft, all, er, shafted. Chassis out of true. Panel damage down the entire right-hand side. Not worth repairing in a car this age.”
“It’s sixteen years old.”
“Yeah.”
The mechanic signed his name carefully at the bottom of the form then tore off the sheet and handed it to my father.
“You’ll need that for your insurance company.”
On the way home my father was pensive and didn’t speak much. I tried to make conversation once or twice but each time, when he responded, it was as though I had dragged him into the present from someplace far away. In the end I left him alone and listened to the radio instead.
That night at dinner, when my father wasn’t looking, Stan kicked me under the table and silently mouthed, Plantasaurus. The warehouse was costing us money each day and good business sense dictated that we begin our operation as soon as possible, so I really couldn’t put off telling my father about the scheme much longer. But right then, with the crash and Pat’s death still so close about him, didn’t seem the best time to tell him something I was certain he was going to object to. So I shook my head at Stan and he and I ate silently and watched my father pick distractedly at the food on his plate.
CHAPTER 12
A week later, when we officially started work on Plantasaurus, I still hadn’t told my father about it. Stan and I went over to the garden center midmorning and found the place full of men in coveralls loading everything that could be moved into trucks outside. Rachel showed us the plants Bill had said Stan could have. There were forty assorted centerpiece shrubs around six feet high-dracaenas, weeping figs, kentia palms, etc.-ten large trays of smaller subtropical plants, and a pallet of potting mix.
It took us two hours to lug the plants and the soil over to our warehouse. When we were done we drove to a copy shop in Oakridge. Earlier that morning we’d sketched out a design for the fliers that were to be our principal means of advertising-I’d written a description of our services and above this Stan had drawn a smiling, cartoon-style brontosaurus holding a big flower in its mouth. We talked through the design with the copy guy and ordered five thousand fliers.
After that, we hit the road for Burton. There was a plastic-molding business there that had the kind of containers we needed as planters for the displays Stan had in mind.
The hour-long drive felt like an adventure-the day was beautiful and we were on a mission, out in the world actively pursuing the dream of self-employment. Stan was twitching with excitement.
“Hey, Johnny, you think we should get the truck painted too?”
“With a dinosaur?”
“Yeah, and the name, so people will know as soon as they see us.”
“This truck?”