That I would never make real money.
Never become anyone important.
Then she picked up her suitcase.
“I deserve more.”
She left.
I sat on the kitchen floor until sunrise.
The divorce took almost a year.
Laura had Brent’s lawyers.
I had an inexpensive attorney who occasionally forgot my sons’ names.
Laura got primary custody.
I got every other weekend and Wednesday dinners.
Then I lost my job.
Brent’s father owned the dealership.
Six weeks after Laura moved into the lake house, my manager called me into the office and announced a “restructuring.”
They suddenly didn’t need me anymore.
Eleven years of work.
Never late.
No complaints.
Gone.
I knew why.
I ended up in a tiny apartment above a pizza place thinking about what Laura had said.
Maybe she was right.
Maybe I really was going nowhere.
Then I thought about Rick and Noah.
And I decided they would never watch me prove her right.
I took everything I had left.
My share from the sale of our house.
Retirement savings.
A little inheritance from my uncle.
And I rented an old two-bay garage on Linden Avenue.
It sat between a laundromat and an abandoned video store.
The roof leaked.
The hydraulic lift barely worked.
The office was barely large enough for a desk.
I repaired the roof myself.
Fixed the lift.
Bought secondhand tools.
Then one Saturday, Rick and Noah painted the sign.
The first year nearly destroyed me.
Some weeks I had two customers.
Some weeks none.
I lived on peanut butter sandwiches.
There were nights I slept in the garage because heating my apartment cost too much.
But slowly, people started hearing about me.
The mechanic on Linden Avenue who wouldn’t sell you a transmission when you needed a twenty-dollar part.
The guy who let people pay in installments when money was tight.
By year two, I had a waiting list.
I hired Marcus, a nineteen-year-old kid who’d struggled in school but could hear an engine once and know what was wrong with it.
I bought another lift.
The shop started surviving.
I still didn’t have much money.
But I had the garage.
And I had Rick and Noah every other weekend.
And Wednesdays.
Laura knew those days were everything to me.
So she learned how to use them.
The first time, she called because she wanted me to pick up Brent’s dry cleaning before collecting the boys.
