Page 7 of My Twin Sister's Ex

3

Bennett

Iwent straight to my uncle’s mechanic shop after school. I didn’t have drama today, so I still didn’t know who my partner would be for the Drama Competition. I normally wasn’t so stressed about my grades or worried about school, but I wanted to graduate. Mrs. Monroe was right. My mom would have wanted me to graduate. I couldn’t bring her back, but I could do this one thing for her.

I pulled up to the auto repair shop in my 1994 partially fixed-up Mustang and parked. I changed into some coveralls so I wouldn’t get grease all over my school clothes.

“Hey, Uncle Ryan,” I called out. He was looking into the engine of an older Chevy Tahoe that had been the top of the line back in its day.

“This is a solidly built vehicle,” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It looks like it needs some new spark plugs.”

Uncle Ryan was the best mechanic in town, and he was teaching me everything he knew. He’d helped me find my Mustang through one of his customers, and he was teaching me how to fix it up on my own. It was far from being where I wanted it to be, but it ran. That was the most important thing.

The best thing about Uncle Ryan was that he was honest. He never ripped off his customers, and he gave them a fair deal on their repairs. Not like the big dealerships in town who tended to inflate their prices.

Uncle Ryan, and my job at his shop, were by far the best parts of my life. I loved working with him. He’d been more of a dad to me than my own father. At least that was the case now. It hadn’t always been like that.

I used to have a normal life when my parents were happily married. I’d been soft and innocent back then. When I was ten, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and our world fell apart. She didn’t make it past my eleventh birthday. That was when my dad started drinking. He used alcohol as a crutch to get through the pain.

I didn’t have anything to help me through it, so I just got tough. But then my straight As dropped to Ds and Fs, and I couldn’t focus on homework anymore. Eventually, I stopped trying. That was when my teachers started treating me like I was a troublemaker. I withdrew into myself and distanced myself from all my friends.

My mom was the one who’d always made sure I was dressed well for school, but my dad was too enveloped in his grief to make sure I had new clothes and shoes for the school year. So, I began working for my uncle after school when I was twelve. That was when I first bought my own clothes. I didn’t have much money, so I shopped at the thrift store. Some ladies from town felt sorry for me and donated some clothes to our family. For a few years, we were the family that had Christmas gifted to them as the charity case in town. I did get some nice clothes and shoes that way. But that didn’t last long, and the do-gooding ladies of Sweet Mountain seemed to forget about us.

In the meantime, my dad stayed drunk. He lost his stable job at the lumber mill. He couldn’t run the equipment when he could hardly stay sober on the job. Right now, he was working construction. For years, he’d floated from job to job, taking work wherever he could. Our nice home fell into disrepair, and our yard turned into a junkyard. Eventually, my dad scared off the nice ladies who had checked in on us from time to time.

I finished my shift with Uncle Ryan, and then I headed home a bit early. I decided to cut back my hours until at least graduation so I could focus on schoolwork. It was too late to do much about most of the classes I’d done poorly in, but I could at least give the rest of the year a bit more effort.

I drove up our long, gravel driveway and stepped out into the muddy yard. It had been raining more than normal this spring, and our grass was soggy. My dad had started collecting broken items since my mom died. He kept saying he planned to fix them up and sell them, but it never happened. So our yard became more and more cluttered as time went on. I hated it, but there was nothing I could do or say to get my dad to stop spending what little money he brought in on old, worthless junk.

Our property used to be a nice place. We had about seven acres of woods with a beautiful creek running right by the house. My dad taught me how to fish in that creek when I was younger, and I still caught fish in it from time to time.

A huge oak tree stood in the front yard. It used to have a tire swing, but the rope had long since rotted, and the tire had fallen to the ground. Now the tire was leaning against a rusty old pickup truck my dad had insisted on buying that was nowhere near running.

He was always a sucker for a “good deal.” My mom used to filter his spending, but with her gone, he had full control of the bank account, and he tended to go a bit overboard.

Dad wasn’t home yet. That was the good news. I went into our log home and made a beeline for the shower. I had to dodge piles of junk that had been building up. It looked like we might have a landslide at any minute. I’d cleaned them up as much as I could, but I wasn’t home enough to keep up on the messes that my dad created while I was working or at school. And if he caught me trying to throw anything out, he lost his mind. Because of his emotional attachment, he hadn’t been able to throw out anything of my mom’s, and her stuff stayed everywhere in the house.

I finished my shower, and as I toweled off, I heard the front door closing. I wrapped my threadbare towel around my waist and opened the bathroom door to peer out. I could see my dad rummaging around in the living room. He seemed to be flipping through a stack of mail, so I headed to my room to get changed.

“You home, Bennett?” he called to me.

“Yup. I’m just getting dressed.” I pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and then came out to find Dad tinkering on another one of his projects with a can of beer at his side. This project was a generator he’d picked up at a local flea market. He’d insisted that it only needed a spark plug, but he had the entire carburetor taken apart on the kitchen table for the past two months. I’d gotten used to eating in my room, which was the only clean place in the house.

He took a swig of his beer and then set the can down. “I need a quarter-inch socket. Look in that toolbox over there. I think I saw one in there last week. If you don’t find it, we’ll have to go to the hardware store.”

I dug through the disorganized pile of rusty tools sitting on the kitchen table next to Mom’s old crockpot that hadn’t been used in eight years. The crockpot had a thick coating of dust on it from Dad’s many projects.

I found the rusty socket and handed it over to my dad. He used to blame me for all his missing tools, and now he blamed it on the kids from the trailer park down the street.

I glanced down at his project. I could immediately tell he didn’t need to take the entire thing apart but knew he was most likely too prideful to listen to advice from me. But I couldn’t help myself. “Why are you taking this entire thing apart? This is a simple fix.”

“What are you talking about?” My dad squinted up at me.

“The carburetor jet needs to be cleaned out. That’s all you need to do.”

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