The summer of 1986 in Elyria, Ohio, smelled like cut grass, hot asphalt, and the cherry air freshener Dennis Okonski hung from the antenna of every car we washed whether the owner wanted one or not. He bought them in bulk from a man in Lorain who also sold fireworks out of a bread truck, and he believed, with the faith other people saved for church, that a cherry tree dangling from a radio antenna was the difference between a two-dollar wash and a two-dollar wash plus a fifty-cent tip.
He was usually right. That was the irritating thing about Dennis. He was right about strange things, and wrong about almost nothing that mattered, and he was the biggest seventeen-year-old in Lorain County without ever once seeming to know it.
We washed cars on Saturdays in the back lot of Saint Casimir's, under a hand-painted sign that said CAR WASH $2 — GOD SEES THE HUBCAPS. Father Lisowski had approved the first part of the sign. Dennis had added the second part in the middle of the night with a paint pen, and Father Lisowski, after a long look, had decided to leave it, because the line of cars on our first Saturday had stretched all the way out onto Middle Avenue.
The deal was simple. The parish got a third for the roof fund. Dennis and I split the rest. We supplied the sponges, the chamois, the Turtle Wax, the radio, and the labor. The parish supplied the hose, the water, the lot, and a folding table where Mrs. Prochazka from the Altar Society sat in a lawn chair taking money and telling every driver they looked thin.
I needed my half more than I had needed anything in my sixteen years, and I had not told Dennis exactly why, which tells you something about me that summer. I was the kind of kid who thought if you said a need out loud it got bigger.
Here was the need. In April, our Pontiac LeMans threw a rod on Route 57 with my mother, Mavis Haydu, behind the wheel, and it died the way old cars die in Ohio, with a bang, a cloud, and a tow bill. My father drove long haul for a freight outfit out of Toledo, and his checks came in irregular, honest amounts that never quite stretched over the hole they were meant to cover. In May, my mother got a job as a nurse's aide on the night shift at Elyria Memorial, eleven to seven, four nights a week, sometimes five. It paid better than the dry cleaner's. It was also three and a half miles from our house on Furnace Street, and the city buses stopped running before ten.