fixed by himself in his father's garage, with a hammer and a dolly and a library book, and had asked Hutch what he had done wrong.
Hutch told him eleven things. Dennis came back three weeks later with the fender done again and asked about the eleven things, and Hutch told him four more, and then said, "Next summer, you're seventeen, you come see me. You keep your nose clean and your hands in one piece, and I'll teach you the trade." Dennis was buying his own tools that summer, one at a time, from the Snap-on truck that parked behind the shop on Thursdays. He kept the receipts in a cigar box. He showed me every new tool like a man showing pictures of his children.
So that was where our money went. His into a body hammer, mine into a pale green Dart. We were both, in our way, buying a future one Saturday at a time.
The trouble came on the fourth Saturday in July, a little after eleven, when the sun was high enough that the water dried in spots if you weren't fast, and the radio on Mrs. Prochazka's table was playing Simple Minds, and we had a line of five cars. I was on my knees doing the whitewalls of a Ford Fairmont that belonged to the woman who ran the bakery on Broad, and Dennis was on the roof of a conversion van, actually on the roof, barefoot, scrubbing a bird situation that the van's owner had described as biblical.
I heard the Corvette before I saw it. Everybody in Elyria knew the sound, because there was only one like it in town. It came in off Middle Avenue low and slow with the top down, a 1986 convertible in Flame Red, the first year they made a Corvette convertible since 1975, and it rolled past the line of waiting cars without stopping and pulled right up next to the hose.
Winthrop Conway was behind the wheel.
Everybody called him Win, the way everybody called his father's dealership the Chevy place, without thinking about it. He was seventeen, a year ahead of me, and he went to Saint Ignatius in Cleveland on a scholarship that was rumored to be not really a scholarship. He had the kind of hair that looked combed even in an open car. He wore a white polo shirt with a little red emblem on it and sunglasses that were the color of root beer. On the license plate frame, in chrome letters, it said CONWAY CHEVROLET — ELYRIA'S HOMETOWN DEALER.