The sign above my garage says **CRAIG’S AUTO REPAIR** in uneven red letters.
My sons painted it.
Rick was seven.
Noah was four.
I bought a sheet of plywood, two cans of paint, and laid everything across a pair of sawhorses in the empty garage.
I penciled the letters.
The boys filled them in.
Noah painted the C in CRAIG’S and went outside the lines in every direction.
There’s still a red handprint in one corner where he leaned against the board before the paint dried.
Rick painted almost everything else.
Very carefully.
Tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
He accidentally painted the P in REPAIR backward.
When he noticed, he cried.
So I told him we would fix it.
We painted over it in white and tried again.
If you stand close enough today, you can still see the ghost of that backward P underneath the correct one.
I could have paid someone to make a professional sign.
Metal.
Lights.
Perfect lettering.
I never wanted one.
Every morning at 6:30, when I unlock the garage, I look up at that crooked sign.
And I remember exactly why I’m there.
My name is Craig.
I’m thirty-eight.
I’ve been fixing cars since I was fourteen, when my uncle started letting me hang around his shop in Dayton, Ohio, handing him tools.
I met Laura when I was twenty-three.
She worked at a coffee shop across from the dealership where I was a mechanic.
I started buying a large black coffee every morning even though I didn’t need it.
Mostly because I liked hearing her laugh.
Laura had one of those laughs that filled an entire room.
That was the first thing I loved about her.
It took me four months to ask her out.
She said yes before I finished the sentence.
We were together eleven years.
Married nine.
We had two boys.
Rick, quiet and precise, loved building model cars and refused to accept a crooked decal.
Noah was the opposite.
Loud.
Wild.
Always running.
And he laughed exactly like his mother.
For a long time, we were happy.
I still believe that.
We had a small house with a large backyard.
Sunday pancakes.
Summer trips to the lake.
A dog named Biscuit who once ate an entire birthday cake while we were singing to Rick in another room.
We didn’t have luxury.
