at a scrap of fender for ten minutes, and then twelve, and then said, "Come back at Christmas." It was not a yes. Dennis said later that it was the best not-a-yes he had ever heard.
I asked him once, years after, whether he would do it again, the punch. We were sitting on the tailgate of his truck outside the shop that had his name on it by then, though that is a different story and a long way off. He thought about it for a while, turning a socket over in his hand, his left, out of habit.
"I'd say back off, man," he said finally. "I'd say it just like that. I'd get down off the van." He set the socket down. "And then I'd stand there. I'd just stand there with you, and see what he did."
"What do you think he'd have done?"
Dennis shrugged. "I don't know. That's the thing. I didn't wait long enough to find out."
But that was later. On the last Saturday of August in 1986, the line at the Saint Casimir's car wash stretched out onto Middle Avenue again, and I was on my knees doing the whitewalls of a Plymouth Reliant with Simple Minds on Mrs. Prochazka's radio, because she had grown fond of it, and Dennis was on the folding table with his cast, now covered in the signatures of half the parish, telling the Plymouth's owner that a cherry tree was what his car had been missing all its life.
Around noon I heard a car come in off Middle Avenue, a thin, coughing four-cylinder sound, and I looked up, and it was a brown Chevette with a passenger door you had to lift to close.
It did not cut the line. It pulled in at the very end, behind a pickup and a station wagon and a Monte Carlo with a cracked taillight, and sat there with the engine running, and the driver got out and stood beside it in a gray T-shirt with his hands in his pockets, waiting his turn. His eye had faded to a faint yellow shadow you could only see in the sun.
Dennis saw him. Dennis looked at me.
I stood up, and wiped my hands on my jeans, and picked up a bucket and a sponge, and walked down the line toward him, past the Monte Carlo and the station wagon and the pickup, not knowing exactly what I would say when I got there, only that I had decided, this time, to go and find out.