The carburetor off a Toro Recycler has a float bowl about the size of a coffee cup, and if you hold it up to the light from the garage window after you have soaked it, you can see whether the little brass jet in the middle is clear. You look through the hole the way you would look through a straw. If there is a pinprick of daylight, you are good. If there is not, you get the wire.
Grandpa kept the wire in an old film canister on the second shelf above the bench, between a coffee can of cotter pins and a jar of mismatched washers that he called the orphanage. The wire was finer than a guitar string. The first time he showed it to me, the summer I was twelve, he held it out between his thumb and his first finger and it trembled so hard it looked like it was alive, and he laughed and said, "You see why I need you."
I didn't see, not then. I thought he was being nice. He was always being nice in a way that sounded like complaining, which is a Basaraba thing, Mom says. Her father could hand you a twenty-dollar bill and make it sound like he was asking you to take out his trash.
By the March I am telling about, I was fourteen and I had been looking through float bowl jets for almost two years, and I did not need him to tell me what to do with the wire. I needed him to sit on the stool by the space heater and drink his coffee out of the thermos lid and tell me about the engine anyway, because that was the part I liked.
"That one's been sitting in a shed with gas in it since Obama," he said. "You can smell it. Smell it."
I smelled it. Old gas smells like varnish and a little like pickles. When it sits long enough in a carburetor, it turns into a gold-brown gum that clogs everything, and the engine will crank and crank and never catch, and the person who owns the mower will decide it is broken and buy a new one at Lowe's for four hundred dollars, and leave the old one at the curb on a Tuesday with a sign that says FREE in marker on the back of a cereal box.
That was where most of my mowers came from. The curb. Grandpa drove the truck, a gray Silverado with a dent in the tailgate shaped like Michigan, and I rode in the passenger seat with my feet on the dash, which Mom did not allow and Grandpa did not notice, and we went up and down the streets of Bucyrus on the evenings before trash day looking for FREE signs. In the spring there were a lot. In the fall there were leaf blowers and string trimmers, and once a whole Craftsman riding mower with a dead battery and a mouse nest in the air filter housing that a man on Kaler Street was so happy to get rid of that he helped us winch it up onto the trailer.
I fixed it in nine days. I sold it for six hundred and fifty dollars to a woman who kept goats.
That was the biggest sale. Most were smaller. A push mower I could get running and clean up and put new blades on would sell for between eighty and a hundred and sixty dollars, depending on the brand and whether it was self-propelled, and the parts usually ran me between twelve and forty. I kept a notebook. It was a green composition book that said ENGINE LOG on the cover in Grandpa's block capitals, because he had started it the first summer when he still thought he was going to do most of the work and I was going to hand him things. By the March I am telling about, there were thirty-one engines in it, each with a page, each with what was wrong, what I replaced, what it cost, what it sold for, and who bought it. The last column was Grandpa's idea. "You want to know who your customers are," he said. "Half of them will come back. The other half will tell their brother-in-law."
He was right. The goat woman's brother-in-law bought a Honda from me in August.