Marty came over the following Saturday with his floor jack and his toolbox, and the two old men spent the day going over the Mustang bumper to bumper, the way doctors go over a patient, with grunts and silences and the occasional low whistle. The news was mixed. The engine turned over, which was a small miracle. The brakes needed a full rebuild. The tires were dry-rotted and had to be replaced. The exhaust had a hole the size of a fist. The electrical system was, in Marty's words, a haunted house. Marty made a list on the back of a parts catalog, and when he added it up he looked at Harold sideways and said, Hal, you're looking at maybe four thousand dollars, give or take, and Harold nodded as though Marty had told him the time of day, though four thousand dollars was more than he had in savings after the medical bills. Marty said, We'll do it in stages, brakes first, and Harold said, In stages, and neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that fourteen days was not stages, fourteen days was a cliff.
Harold sold his father's watch. It was a Hamilton railroad watch from 1948, the only thing of value he owned that was truly his, and he had wound it every Sunday for sixty years, and the pawnshop man on Route 9 gave him six hundred dollars for it without looking up from his phone, and Harold walked out into the parking lot and stood there for a minute with the money in his envelope, feeling the absence of the watch's weight in his pocket like a missing tooth. He ordered the brake parts. He paid the DMV fees. He filed the smog exemption. He did everything the list told him to do, working through it with the same methodical determination that had carried him through thirty years of three a.m. alarms, and every evening he sat on the porch and looked at the Mustang and did the arithmetic of days in his head, and the arithmetic never came out right.
On the thirteenth day, a second letter arrived. It said the violation had not been cured, that fines of fifty dollars per day had been accruing since the expiration of the cure period, that the current balance was seven hundred dollars, and that the association had authorized a towing company, All-Star Recovery, to remove the vehicle on the morning of the fifteenth day, and that any interference with the tow would be reported to the police. Harold read it twice and set it down, and then he picked up the phone and called the non-emergency number of the county police, and in a voice as steady as he could make it he asked to speak with someone about a dispute with his homeowners association, and the dispatcher told him an officer would be sent out in the morning to keep the peace during the tow, and Harold thanked her and hung up and sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, and the house was so quiet he could hear the clock in the hallway, the one Eleanor had wound every Sunday, ticking away the hours he had left.
That night he could not sleep. He got up at two and went out to the garage and found the box of Eleanor's things he had not been able to open, the one labeled in her handwriting with the word MISC, and he opened it sitting on the cold concrete floor, and inside were the programs from every concert they had ever attended, and a dried corsage from their fortieth anniversary, and a photograph of the two of them leaning against the Mustang on the day they brought it home, young and sunburned and laughing, Eleanor's arm around his waist, his arm around her shoulders, the whole world ahead of them. He held the photograph for a long time. Then he went out to the driveway in his pajamas and his coat, and he sat in the driver's seat of the Mustang with the photograph on the dashboard, and he talked to Eleanor the way he had talked to her every night for nineteen months, telling her about his day, about Marty, about the watch, about Diane Kessler and her golf carts and her rules, and when he was finished he said, I'm sorry, Ellie, I tried, and he sat there until the sky began to lighten in the east and the birds began, and then he went inside and showered and put on his good jacket again, the one from the funeral, and he waited for the tow truck with his coffee going cold in his hands.