Win was quiet for a long time.
"Yes, sir," he said.
"And nobody," said Mr. Okonski, who had not spoken since Win's speech, "pays eleven hundred dollars to anybody."
"No, sir," said Win. "Nobody does."
The materials came to a hundred and ninety-four dollars, at cost, which Hutch wrote out on the back of an invoice in grease pencil: resin, hardener, fiberglass mat and cloth, a can of body filler, a can of glazing putty, sandpaper in five grits, primer, and a quart of Flame Red mixed to the paint code off the Corvette's service tag, which Hutch said would still need tinting by eye because no two batches of red ever matched. Win had a hundred and forty dollars in his wallet. He had earned it working the used lot after school since March, he said, moving cars and washing windshields, because his father could not pay him and would not admit he could not pay him, and so paid him in cash out of the petty drawer and told him not to mention it to his mother, who had moved to Columbus the year before and was not, Win said, coming back.
I took sixty dollars out of the Band-Aid tin and put it on Hutch's workbench next to Win's hundred and forty, before anybody could stop me. Win started to say something. I looked at him, and he didn't.
"Change is six bucks," said Hutch, and gave it to me.
We started that night at seven. I will not pretend it was romantic. It was hot in the bay even with both doors open, and the resin smelled like a chemical plant and made your eyes water, and Hutch made us wear paper masks and rubber gloves that filled up with sweat inside of five minutes. Dennis sat on an overturned bucket next to the door with his cast in his lap and talked, and Win and I did exactly what he told us.
First we took the inside door panel off, which took an hour, because there were plastic clips hidden behind the armrest that Dennis knew about only from a diagram in a Chilton's manual Hutch dug out of a filing cabinet. Then we masked off the window and the rest of the door with tape and newspaper. Then Dennis had Win, not me, take the grinder to the crack.
"You want a vee," Dennis said. "Not a ditch. A vee. You're making a valley for the new glass to lie in. Wider at the top than the bottom. Feather it out about an inch either side. Don't go through. If you go through, we've got a hole instead of a crack and we're here till Christmas."