He had not talked about the war. When people asked her, as people did, about her father and the war, about what he had seen, she told them the truth, which was that she did not know, because he had decided not to tell her, and she had decided, a long time ago, to let him decide that. She knew the outline. She knew he had been a mechanic for the agricultural cooperative outside Doboj before. She knew that in the spring of 1992 he had put her and her mother on a bus with a duffel bag and a bag of bread and a phone number in Germany written on the inside of her mother's wrist in ballpoint pen, and had not gotten on the bus himself, and that eleven months later he had walked into the asylum hostel in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt forty pounds lighter with a beard and a cough, and that she, seven years old, had not recognized him and had hidden behind her mother's legs, and that he had knelt on the linoleum and waited, with his hands on his knees, until she came out. That was all she knew. That was enough.
What he talked about instead was Herr Bauer. Herr Bauer had run a Mercedes service shop in Untertürkheim, a few streets from the factory, and in 1994, when the asylum office let refugees take work, he had hired her father to sweep. He had told her father later, laughing, that he took one look at this skinny Bosnian with the bad German and thought, this one will steal the socket wrenches and be gone by Christmas. But her father had swept, and he had swept the bays so well that Herr Bauer had let him drain oil, and he had drained oil so well that Herr Bauer had let him change filters, and by 1996 her father had his own bay and his own toolbox and was doing injection pumps on 300Ds and 240Ds and old 200 taxis that came in from all over Stuttgart, because Herr Bauer had told everybody, the Bosnian has the best ears in Baden-Württemberg. Her father could listen to a five-cylinder diesel at idle and tell you which injector was dribbling. He could hear a valve that needed adjustment the way her mother could hear a wrong note in a song on the radio.
In 1997 the German government decided that the war was over and the Bosnians should go home. There was no home to go to; the house in Doboj had someone else's family in it. Herr Bauer wrote letters. Herr Bauer went with her father to the Ausländerbehörde three times and stood at the counter in his good suit and said that this man was the best diesel mechanic he had ever employed, and that if Germany sent him back to Bosnia to sit in a refugee camp it was a crime and a stupidity, in that order. It did not work. What worked was a resettlement program to the United States, and a church in St. Louis that sponsored families, and a plane in February of 1998 with her father in the window seat holding a box on his lap. Inside the box was a set of German metric wrenches with red handles that Herr Bauer had given him at the airport. The wrenches were in the top drawer of the toolbox in the second bay of the shop on Morgan Ford Road. Selma used them every day.
So that was why. When people asked her, as people also did, why a woman who could afford a reasonable car drove an old diesel Mercedes that smelled like a school bus and took a full minute to warm up on cold mornings, she sometimes told them about Herr Bauer and sometimes did not. Mostly she said it was her father's. That was true, too, though it was not the whole truth, because the car had not been her father's first. It had been somebody else's first. Her father had always been careful to say so.
She opened the driver's door with the key.
She liked this, the old key, the plain steel blade and the black plastic head with the three-pointed star pressed into it. You turned it in the door and there was a pause and then, all around the car, with a sound like a long breath let out, every lock button rose at once. Her father had explained it to her when she was twenty-eight and sitting in the passenger seat for the first time after he finished the rebuild: there was a vacuum pump, and lines that ran through the doors, and when you turned the key you let the pressure go and the whole car exhaled. Kenan called it the car sighing. When he was smaller he had begged to be the one to unlock it, so that he could hear it sigh.
She sat. She put the key in the ignition and turned it to the second position and watched the small orange coil light come on in the dash, the glow plug light, and waited for it to go out. Fifteen seconds in October. On a January morning, thirty or more. Her father had sat like this every day for thirteen years, waiting, his hands loose on the big thin steering wheel, and while he waited he had always reached over with his right index finger and touched the small brass medal that was screwed into the dash beside the clock.
She did not touch it. She had never touched it, in two years of Fridays. She looked at it, the way she always looked at it, the way you look at a photograph on someone else's wall.
It was a St. Christopher medal, about the size of a quarter, the saint with a child on his shoulder and a staff in his hand, wading through water. The brass had gone dark everywhere except along the rim and on the raised shoulder of the saint, where her father's finger had polished it for thirteen years. It was held to the dash by two small brass screws, one above and one below, the kind of screws you would use on a cabinet hinge. When her father had bought the car at the salvage auction in Sauget, it had been stripped of everything worth stripping, and the dash pad had been split down the middle from twenty-five summers of sun, and the medal had still been there, screwed into the split pad, because no thief in his right mind would take the time to unscrew a dollar's worth of brass. Her father had put a new dash pad in. Before he did, he had taken the medal off the old one with a jeweler's screwdriver, cleaned the screws, and put it back on the new one in exactly the same place. He had measured. She had watched him measure.
On the back of the medal, which she had seen only once, the day he took it off, there was an engraving in small, slanting letters: J.K. 1989. COME HOME TO ME. P.
"This is not ours," her father had said, holding it in his palm under the shop light. He had spoken in Bosnian, which he used for things that mattered. "A woman gave this to her husband for his car. She wanted him to come home. You don't take that out of a car just because you paid the auction."