Win held the grinder like it was a live animal. His good eye was squinted almost shut behind the safety glasses and his bad one was swollen shut on its own, so he was essentially working blind. The first pass skittered. Dennis said, "Easy. Let the tool do it. You're not mad at the door." Win laughed, despite himself, a short startled sound. The second pass was better. By nine o'clock the crack was a clean shallow valley, eight inches long, gray and powdery, and Dennis got up off his bucket and came over and looked at it from about two inches away, and said, "Yeah. Okay. That's good," and Win let out a breath like he had been holding it since Saturday.
The second night we laid the glass. Dennis had us cut strips of mat in graduated sizes, smallest first, so each layer overlapped the one below it by a half inch. I mixed the resin in a paper cup, counting drops of hardener out loud while Dennis counted with me, because too much and it would kick before we could spread it and too little and it would never cure. Win laid in the strips with a brush, stippling them down, working out every bubble, the way Dennis showed him by pantomiming with his good hand. It was slow work and it was the kind of work that requires two people to be quiet together for a long time, and somewhere in the middle of the second layer, Win started to talk.
He talked about the Corvette. It was the only new Corvette convertible his father had been allocated that year; the factory had only built so many, and dealers in places like Elyria were lucky to get one. His father had put it on the showroom floor in April under a spotlight with a banner that said THE CONVERTIBLE IS BACK, and people came in to look at it the way they used to come in to look at the new models in the fifties, his father said, when he was a boy and his own father owned the place. Nobody bought it. Forty thousand dollars, give or take, in Lorain County in 1986. So in June his father had put the dealer plate on it and told Win to drive it around town on Saturdays with the top down. Down Broad, around Ely Square, past the high school and the Dairy Queen and the country club. Be seen in it.