You Drive Me Crazy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tarp
Mara takes a $62,000 restoration job from the former driver Cade Renfro and finds her father's Mustang under the tarp; he asks if she knows it and she lies.
The job paid sixty-two thousand dollars, and I almost turned it down because of the name on the check.
Cade Renfro had won Charlotte three times in the number nine car.
I had spent seven years making sure I never heard that name said out loud.
Then the bank sent Mara Tolland, of Tolland Restoration, a notice on a Tuesday, and the name stopped mattering.
The loan on my father's shop was fifty-eight thousand dollars and forty-five days from due.
The Renfro job would cover it, with a little left for the boy.
So I drove to Mooresville with my son on the bench seat beside me and a thermos of burnt coffee in my lap.
The sitter had canceled at six that morning.
Eli was six and a half and had opinions about every car we passed.
"That one's a Chevelle, Mom, but somebody put the wrong wheels on it."
"Somebody did," I said.
"Is the man we're seeing rich?"
"Yes."
"Is he nice?"
"We'll find out."
The gate stood open at the end of a long gravel drive.
Beyond it was a white farmhouse and a four-bay garage bigger than my whole shop.
I parked, told Eli to stay in the truck, and he got out before I finished the sentence.
The side door of the garage rolled up.
A man stepped out wiping his hands on a rag.
He was taller than I remembered, and gray had come in at his temples.
A long pale scar ran down his right forearm from the elbow to the wrist.
He looked at me for a moment.
"Ms. Tolland," he said.
He said it to a stranger.
My stomach dropped and something small and mean in me went quiet with relief.
He had forgotten me.
Seven years of dreading this moment, and he had forgotten me.
"Mr. Renfro," I said.
"You're on time."
"I'm always on time."
"Good."
He looked down at Eli, who was already studying the scar.
"Who's this?"
"My son. The sitter canceled."
"I can see that," Cade said.
He crouched, which his knee did not enjoy, and held out his hand.
"Cade."
"Eli," my son said, and shook it like a man closing a deal.
"Did a car do that to your arm?"
"A wall did."
"Was it a good wall?"
For the first time something moved at the corner of Cade's mouth.
"It was a very hard wall."
I stepped between them, because I could not breathe with the two of them that close together.
"I'd like to see the job," I said.
"Inside."
He led us through the garage, past a lift, a wall of tools hung in outlines, and a spotless floor.
At the far bay stood something under a gray canvas tarp.
The shape was long and low, with a hood that sloped.
I knew the shape before he touched the cloth.
My hands knew it.
"Before I show you, name your terms," Cade said.
"Sixty-two thousand, paid weekly, on Fridays."
"Done."
"I work here, in your garage, my way, with my tools if I want them."
"Done."
"My son comes with me when he has to, and nobody tells him what to do."
"Done."
"And no questions about my life."
He held my eyes a beat longer than I liked.
"Done," he said. "Anything else?"
"If I say a part is wrong, you don't argue."
"I'll argue," Cade said. "You'll win."
Then he pulled the tarp.
The paint was gone, stripped to gray primer, but I would have known it in the dark.
A nineteen sixty-eight Mustang fastback, with the dent in the left quarter that my father put there in nineteen ninety-four.
My father's car.
The car I had sold at twenty-four for forty-one thousand dollars so I could pay a hospital.
My throat closed.
I walked around it because I had to do something with my legs.
I crouched at the rocker, where no one ever looks, and ran my thumb along the seam under the floor pan.
There it was.
A neat bead of weld, and at the end of every inch, a small hook.
I had put those hooks there because my father signed his welds with a tail and I wanted to be like him.
Nobody else on earth welded like that.
"Mom?" Eli said. "Is that our dent?"
I stood so fast the room tilted.
Cade was watching me with his hands loose at his sides and his face perfectly still.
"Something wrong, Ms. Tolland?"
"No."
"You look like you know the car."
His voice was calm.
His eyes were not.
"Do you?" he said.
I thought of my son's cowlick, and the gray of his eyes, and the number he drew on everything.
"No," I said. "I've never seen it before."
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