He called Owen the next morning. He did not explain everything on the phone. He said only that he had found something, that there was no salary in the immediate term, and that he believed it would be worth the investment of time. Owen asked how much Caleb had paid for the property. Caleb said $1,000.
There was a pause. Owen asked him to repeat the number. Caleb did. Another pause, and then Owen said he would be there by 8:00.
When Owen walked into the garage and saw the eight cars partially uncovered, he stood in place for a long moment. He looked at the Camaro, then the Mustang, then the Pantera. He turned to Caleb and said, quietly, that he had to sit down. Caleb told him they would start with the Mustang. Owen took off his jacket and asked where the tools were.
The first 2 months were the kind of work that does not photograph well and does not make for easy storytelling. It was relentless, repetitive, cold, and occasionally demoralizing. Caleb slept in the garage during the first 3 weeks to save the rent money, laying a cot near the south wall where the wind did not cut through. They worked from before sunrise to well past dark most days.
The Mustang required a crankshaft replacement, a part that had to be sourced through a private supplier in Ohio. And the 3-week wait meant they shifted to preparation work on the Camaro and the Bel Air, pulling apart, cleaning, cataloging, assessing what could be rebuilt, and what had to be replaced.
Caleb spent his own money carefully. $18,000 had seemed like a workable foundation, but between replacement parts, specialty fluids, body shop compounds, new wiring harnesses, and the welding rod and sheet metal stock that Owen went through at a steady pace, the account moved in one direction. By the end of the first month, he had $1,200 left. He did not tell Owen. He took two nights of towing work through a contact at the impound yard to generate enough cash to order the next batch of supplies and said nothing about it.
One night in the middle of February, a section of the eastern roof failed in a rainstorm. Not catastrophically, but enough that water poured directly into the open engine bay of the Camaro, which they had fully disassembled for inspection. Owen put his fist on the workbench and said several things that are not worth repeating. Caleb stood looking at the water pooling in the cylinder cavities, then found two additional tarps and covered everything that was exposed. He cleaned up the water with rags.
He went back to what he had been doing. Owen watched him for a minute and then picked up his tools and went back to work, too.
There was a period around the third week of February when Caleb sat alone in the garage late at night and took out a small notebook, not the spiral one with the vehicle records, but an older one water stained at the corner that had belonged to his father. Raymond Merritt had written notes in it across 30 years of working on cars, observations, measurements, reminders, small pieces of philosophy that had accumulated the way grease accumulates in the threads of an old bolt.