Win nodded. Then he turned to me. He took a long time to say it, and when he did, he said it straight, without the country club in it. "I'm sorry, Rollie. About your dad. About your mom. About the five. It was the worst thing I've ever said to anybody, and I said it on purpose."
I wanted to say something big. I wanted to say it was okay, or that it wasn't okay, or something that would make it come out even. What I said was, "She liked you. When you walked her around the lot. She came home and said a nice boy showed her a car."
Something happened to Win's face then, and he turned and looked at the Corvette for a while, and none of us said anything.
Hutch broke the silence. He had been standing there the whole time with the rag in his fist, listening, and now he walked out of the bay and around the Corvette once, slowly, and crouched by the driver's door and ran his thumb along the crack without quite touching it. Then he opened the door and looked at the inside panel, and closed it again, and stood up.
"Here's what I'll do," he said. "I'm not doing this job. I've got a Thunderbird and two Buicks and a Monday morning." He jerked his chin at the door. "But I'll let it sit in my second bay tonight and tomorrow night and Tuesday night, and I'll sell you the materials at my cost, and I'll stand in the corner with a cup of coffee. And you two"—he pointed at Win and me—"will do the work. Because Dennis can't."
"I don't know how to fix fiberglass," Win said.
"Neither do I," I said.
"No," Hutch agreed. "But he does." And he pointed at Dennis.
Dennis looked down at his cast and then back up at Hutch, and for the first time since Saturday morning something came into his face that was not grief.
"I've only done it on a Nova fender," he said. "Hand-laid. Out of a library book."
"Then you've done it once more than these two." Hutch tossed him the rag. Dennis caught it, left-handed, clumsily. "You talk. They work. I watch. If you tell them wrong, I'll tell you. If they screw it up, I'll make them do it again. Wednesday seven a.m., that car rolls out of my bay looking like it came off the truck in Bowling Green, or it doesn't, and either way, Mr. Conway"—to Win—"you tell your father the truth about what happened, every part of it, before that auditor sets one foot on your lot. That's my price."