ten-thirty for the rest of that summer, and he and my mother talked, she told me, about vinyl tops and Saint Ignatius and his mother in Columbus and my father on the road, and once, for twenty minutes in the hospital parking lot with the engine running, about nothing at all.
"He's a nice boy," my mother said. "He's a sad boy. Those aren't opposites."
Father Lisowski let us start the car wash again in the middle of August. He had conditions. Mrs. Prochazka would be present at all times. The sign would stay, including the hubcaps. And at the first sign of anyone getting out of a car for any reason other than to hand over two dollars, the hose would be turned off and the water would go back to the Lord.
Dennis could not wash cars, not really, not with the cast. He sat on the folding table next to Mrs. Prochazka and handed out cherry air fresheners left-handed and told people what they had done wrong with their wax. He had started going to physical therapy three times a week at the hospital, squeezing a rubber ball and picking up dried beans one at a time with his taped fingers and putting them in a coffee cup, and he hated it, and he did every minute of it. Twice that August, Hutch Vukovich stopped by the church lot in his truck on his way somewhere and sat in it with the window down and watched Dennis talk some guy out of using dish soap on his Cutlass. He never got out. He never said anything. The second time, he called Dennis over to the window and handed him a paper bag, and inside it was a used body hammer with a worn hickory handle that had been wrapped, at the grip, in fresh cloth tape.
"That's my old one," Hutch said. "From 'fifty-three. When the grip came back." He put the truck in gear. "Doesn't mean anything. Just don't want it rusting in a drawer."
Dennis held it in his left hand for the rest of the afternoon.
The doctor said eight weeks, and then he said ten, and in October, when the cast came off, Dennis's hand was thin and pale and smelled terrible, and the knuckle of his little finger sat lower than the others and always would. He could make a fist. He could not yet hold a hammer for more than ten minutes before the ache went up into his wrist. He went back to Hutch's shop on a Saturday and showed him, and Hutch watched him swing the old body hammer