News
Storytelling

Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

Chapter 6

Theme:
Font Size:
24px
Faye had that sentence written in pencil on the inside flap of the spiral notebook in her glove compartment. Underneath it, her father had sketched a 1967 Pontiac 400 cylinder head. He had drawn it for her when she was nine, on a Tuesday afternoon while the shop radio played B.B. King.Leonard Carter died of a stroke when Faye was nineteen. He had no life insurance. He had a mortgage on the shop building that was two months behind. The bank repossessed the two bays within four months. The hand-painted sign went into a dumpster behind the post office.Faye had a full scholarship to Purdue's mechanical engineering program. She started in the fall of her nineteenth year. She was one of four Black women in her cohort of 160.In her third year, her mother, Ruth, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Faye withdrew from Purdue, moved home, and cared for her mother alone for three years, paying the bills with a Medicaid waiver and what was left of the insurance settlement from her father's car. Ruth died eight months before this story begins.After the funeral, the last of the paperwork revealed a predatory reverse mortgage that Ruth had signed during the early stages of her disease without Faye's knowledge, to a company operating out of a strip mall in Merrillville. The house was gone inside ninety days.Faye could have stayed in Gary. Two independent shops had offered her work after her father's funeral three years earlier. She had turned them both down. She had turned them down because both owners, at Leonard's wake, had looked at her with a particular kind of pity: the pity of men who had watched a better mechanic than themselves go out of business and had felt something like relief. She knew it was a stubborn reason. She knew she was paying for her pride in miles and meals. She still could not bring herself to walk through either of those doors.She drove south to Austin in the Odyssey with $340 in her pocket, Beans in the passenger seat, and her father's red accordion folder of SAE papers under the driver's seat. She had been in the city seven months when she stopped one morning at a chain-link fence in the Domain District and listened to an engine that was being lied to.She did not know yet that she had also been lied to by every person who had told her, in every year since her father died, that the world only listens to people who look like they belong in the room.At 8:53 the next morning, a black Lincoln Navigator pulled up to the main gate of the Arkwell Dynamics campus. An older man in a gray suit stepped out. He didn't walk to the main entrance; he walked around the building, across the parking lot to the chain-link fence where the $20 bill still lay in a dried ring of motor oil.He stood there for a long moment. He picked up the bill. He folded it once, neatly, and put it into his jacket pocket. Then he walked through the side door into the test bay.Inside the bay, Preston Whitlock III was briefing the engineering team. He had spent most of the night rehearsing what he would say to the board if the engine didn't start. He hadn't seen the older man arrive.He turned when he heard the side door open. "Who let you in here?""Gregory did.""Gregory is the CEO of this company. I'm the CTO, and I don't know who you are.""Eleanor Ashford."
PREV NEXT

News in the same category

Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

17 Part