My Life In A Car, Part III

My life in a car, Part III

I smiled at Ron Weider.  “We got it. We got it right in time!”

Ron was grinning back at me just as widely.  “We sure do.”  Between us was the drawing.  Not just a drawing, but THE drawing.  Behind us a clay and bondo mock-up of the finished product rested on real tires in the engineering garage.  It was late on a Friday night, but we had a bet and we weren’t going to lose.

The suspension crew had managed to shoe horn an all wheel drive system into their frame based on some older technology with a few updates.  It worked, and I would wager it would work well and cheap too.  They had issued a challenge to us though: update the chassis and drive line for the horsepower we were going to put in that car in one week.

That was a lot faster than most engineers ever made something like this work.  We usually took more time than that.  In this case we were talking about a task that took months.

Ron leaned back in his chair and giggled.  “Oh man.  Good thing too, I didn’t want to work on Saturday.”

“Nope.  I gotta take Sarah to the hospital tomorrow.”

Ron looked at me.  “Something wrong?”

“No, no not at all.  They’re going to induce if she doesn’t go into labor tonight.”  I smiled.  I was nervous about the car and nervous about the child.  The car was my first real design and engineering job.  The child was my first too.  “I want to win the bet, but I would have lost the bet rather than not take her in.”

Ron smiled.  “I would have kicked you square in the ball-sack if you had put time on the car before that little lady of yours, Alex.”  Ron was a grandfatherly image.  We called him ‘Pa’ around the shop.  He was bald-headed with a ring of white hair around his ears and a ruddy, round face that I never saw look dour.  Sarah and I had already asked him to be the baby’s god-father.

“I think I’m going to sit at home tomorrow, call up Glen, and tell him we won the bet,” Ron said.

“We don’t have a working prototype,” I said.  We didn’t, we had a set of plans.

“Sure we do.  Or we will in a few minutes when I edit this old autocad image.  We’ll have a prototype that works en machina.  Good as gold for an engineer.”  Ron winked at me.  

“And the fitting differences?”  There were some small but obvious problems.

“We’ll punt.  Look, Alex, get home.  We’re done here, go take care of that little lady.  If you’re lucky she won’t wake you up at three in the morning telling you it’s time to go.”

I laughed.  “As late as she is it would be just like our over-dramatic Sarah to do just that.”  I ran one hand over my bald head and smiled.  “You need a lift?”

Ron shook his head.  “Nope.  I’m going home a little bit later.  Gotta doctor me some drawings.”

I left with a smile.  The General Motors Phoenix Proving Grounds were an interesting place to work.  They sat in the desert away from town, but the city was rapidly approaching.  We rarely got to do something like we were with this bet.  Our job was to build stuff that had already been designed, and then work the bugs out.  It was a wonderful, fun job.  I would probably still be doing something for barely more than poverty-level wages if it wasn’t for Sarah.  She had over the years proven to possess the perfect mix of ‘get your ass in gear,’ and ‘I know you can do it!’  She got me through college and graduate school.  Oh, she told other people it was all me, but I always smiled when she did.  She was the one holding me up while I did it.

I got into my little ZR2 and fired it up.  One hundred and seventy thousand miles later the truck rattled like a pissed-off diamond-back rattlesnake, but it still ran strong.  One thing my years in school and turning wrenches to pay my dues had taught me: take care of it.

I pulled out onto Ellsworth and headed back toward Chandler.  Our house was a modest three bedroom place that was worth far more now than I had paid for it when I had come to Arizona to get my Masters degree at ASU.  I still had money from that fateful accident, but now most of it was in a college fund for our children.

As I drove home I smiled.  I would know if it was a boy or a girl very soon.

*

Amy greeted me at the door when I got home.  “Hey, you!  You’re late for a man who’s about to become a father.”  The chastisement was jubilant though.  Amy was as happy to see me as Sarah was when I got home.  

Sarah was way too pregnant to come bounding to the door like some kind of joyous puppy.  Instead she walked in her ready-to-pop swayback stagger to me and hugged me and kissed me on the cheek in our foyer.  “Hey you!” she said.  “Working on the fast car again?”

“I was,” I admitted.  The ‘fast car’ was Sarah’s name for the current project.  GM had threatened to fire and sue the daylights out of anyone who mentioned or leaked the project because there was a very delicate issue with our current project and Canada.  We were going to do something the Canadians might have a legal recourse over if we weren’t careful.  It was, in fact, the 2008 Camaro we were working on, we just couldn’t own up to it.

I was proud-but not as proud as I would be when I could tell folks openly about the car I had worked on for two years now.  And no where near as proud as I was of Sarah and the perfect little child she was nurturing.

Amy socked me on the shoulder.  “You should be paying more attention to her,” she said.  “She needs it right now.  You ought to know the hormones are raging and she isn’t exactly mobile.”

I shrugged, “You’re here.  I can think of no one better to watch over her.”

Amy shook her head.  She was still single after Roger had died in that crash years ago.  Eleven years and she had dated, but she hadn’t married.  Now she doted on Sarah every chance she got.  The only reason we had asked Ron and his wife to be the child’s god parents instead of Amy was the constant string of relationships.  Amy was, well… frivolous.  

“Come on you big walking case of spousal neglect.  Dinner is waiting,” Sarah said.  

*

After Amy had helped clean up and gone home for the night I was sitting with Sarah in the living room.  She was watching TV and occasionally glancing at the clock (a gesture that I completely missed).  I was quite happy to just be there.  “Tell me Alex, are you happy?” she finally asked.

I looked at her and I was a little surprised.  She never asked these things.  She was always strong and self-sure.  “Why do you ask?” I said.

“We’re about to have a child.  This is a huge step.”

I pointed at her belly, “Not to be rude there babe, but if I’m not happy it’s waaaay too late to do anything about it.  Of course I’m happy.  I loved you from the second I laid eyes on you.”  I never saw Sarah as anything but perfect.

She sighed.  “It’s time,” she said.

“Right,” I said.  I got up and turned off the TV casually, thinking she meant time for bed.  

“No, Alex, it’s TIME.”

I looked at her.  She pointed to her belly.  I looked at her.  She rolled her eyes.  “Alex, it’s time for the baby.”  I looked at her.  Somewhere in there the thought of kicking Ron for jinxing me ran through my head.

“Right now?” I finally asked.

“Right now,” she replied.

“You and your dramatic timing.  Let me go get the bag.”  I wasn’t hurried for one reason: the hospital was three blocks away.  We just happened to have picked a house that was less than half a mile from Chandler Regional Hospital.  I hadn’t planned for this contingency but I was glad it had all worked out in my favor.

The bag had been packed for a week, so I grabbed it and got my keys from the dresser.  It was Pheonix; a jacket would have been smothering.  We were out the door in moments.  I really don’t remember the ride at all.

“You don’t need anything else you can think of?” I asked as we got into my truck.

“Can’t think of anything,” she said, and smiled.

*

We took her home from the hospital a week later.  I was beyond thankful for the good health insurance working for a big company.  I remember that first trip home clear as day.  She was so precious, so beautiful, and so very fragile.  I thought she was every cliché thing a parent ever thinks about their child.  I know she wasn’t anything special; she was as much a gift as any child ever born.  But she was my baby girl.

Sarah and I named her Olivia Hope.

Ron had his camera and took pictures of us leaving the hospital and when we got home.  He brought me my share of the bet money in the hospital on Monday.  Poor Sarah spent almost 48 hours in labor and at a couple of points the doctors were worried about her.  When she finally delivered Olivia she was exhausted.

We named the first production Camaro that rolled off the assembly line Olivia.  Ron got it and presented it to me as a gift: serial number eleven.  The first ten were set aside for special uses, like car shows and the like.  Chip Foose got one for instance.  But number eleven was ours and we called it Olivia.