as a badge of honor around him, secretly gratified that he was now playing the role of errand boy that I used to play—the lowest man on the totem pole. But I was a mechanic, even if I still had my training wheels on. I enjoyed seeing John doing these menial tasks, and you would think that was good enough for me, but I found myself still playing the big brother role, giving him grief, and making his job tougher. After he swept an area, I would dirty it up. Now that's just brotherly love.
By the time John finished up his chores, we were all ready to go home, Belcher caravan style. Since we had all arrived at different times and in different cars, our competitive natures kicked in and we would race to see who would make it home first. I would sometimes branch off from the traditional route, hoping to find a new short cut or to get lucky with traffic on side streets. Sometimes it paid off; other times I would get lost and catch all kinds of grief for arriving late for supper.
When Dad had first noticed the shop, it was a failed mechanic business unimaginatively called "Pete's" that had boarded up windows and a "for sale" sign. Dad had been wanting to launch his own business and Pete's seemed like the perfect size and location. Poor Pete, as our family called him, was a cranky old man too set in his ways to upgrade his tools and methods, and he hemorrhaged customers as a result. As less and less business trickled in, Pete shut down one wing of the building, which basically became a used part grave yard.
Poor Pete was only too glad to offload his shop, and Dad got it for a steal. For months, Dad and Charlie (whom Dad had already promised a head mechanic spot) focused on the getting the operational half of the building, well, operational. It was in decent enough shape to get their business started, but Dad always had designs on the closed off wing. He knew if he could just clear those additional bays and set up a back office, he would be able to bring in even more business.
But time and the pressures of succeeding at a new business got away from Dad and the long days and even longer weeks piled up. Dad had a simple rule—no work on Sunday. It wasn't so much of a religious thing with him as it was a marriage saver. In fact, he called Sunday "Kate-day" after my mom. He would say, "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."
My mom was always supportive of Dad and the sacrifices he had to make for the business, but she fully owned Sunday as her day. She preferred those Sundays when the whole family would attend church together, the early morning Mass, and then go out to breakfast afterward. As John and I got older, we made it to Mass less and less frequently, but we never skipped breakfast. Rain or shine, we had a seat at The Family Table, a modest diner on Main Street. We were the regulars and everyone at the FT knew us, especially Donna who somehow managed to always land our table. Donna had old-school waitress written all over her, complete with a deep smoker’s voice and a tendency to call everyone "Hon." Sounds cliché, but that's how it was. It was all a part of keeping Mama happy.
One slow day at the shop, I was going through "the shop keys" which was a ring of mystery keys that Poor Pete had left behind. I basically tried various keys on various doors or drawers trying to figure out what they opened. I ended up finding a spare key to the closed down wing of the building. That wing featured a small office that looked like a room from a scary movie, so dark and creepy that you knew there had to be someone hiding behind the stacks of old boxes. Then there was a hinged swing door that opened into the auto lift area. I flipped the light switch and it took a good 20 seconds before I heard a low hum and the room was bathed in dim light. There was space for at least four more cars if you cleared all the junk. In the partially buzzed-out fluorescent glow, I caught a glimpse of Dad's vision in that moment. I could see the business doubling if we could get that side opened.
Noises from the other side snapped me back, and for some reason I turned the lights out and ducked down, as if I had been trespassing. That was when I decided I do it. I would clean up this wing as a surprise for Dad and present it to him for his birthday. The trick was to keep it a surprise. For that, I would need help and decided to bring John in on my scheme. We could go over on Sundays after breakfast and make some excuse about plans. Or we could even take turns disappearing during a shift and cover for each other.
And that's what we did. Dad's birthday was in September, so we had four months to get it done. It was hard to get much done during the day, since Dad was there all the time, so we had to rely on Sundays. And I realized quickly I'd have to call in the big guns, so we drew Mom into our conspiracy. As we would wolf down our Sunday breakfast and make to leave the FT, Dad would raise and inquiring eyebrow, and Mom would keep him at bay with a "oh, they've got that youth group thing" or "ah, let 'em go. We need some us time."
It was very slow going at first since John and I didn't know what we were doing and didn't feel super-motivated to work on our Sunday day off. We did some of the surface cleaning and trash removal the first Sunday. I put John to work removing the stacks of old newspapers in the front office and he eventually got bored with it and started throwing wads of newsprint my way. I, of course, had to retaliate and I think we ended up making more of a mess than we'd started with that day. The next few weekends we made a small dent in the clean-up, to the point that I began to be worried about getting it done in time. I insisted John sneak back there as often as possible to put in some extra time since he wasn't directly involved in the actual mechanical repairs, and no one would miss him around the shop. I armed John with a flash light to work by, since turning on the lights in that wing would attract too much attention. I would keep watch and we devised what we thought was a clever signal to notify him if someone was coming. If I saw that Dad or someone was approaching the dormant wing, I was to yell very loudly, "Could you bring me a coffee?" When John heard that, he would know to keep still and turn off his flash light. "That's good coffee!" was my signal back to John that the coast was clear.
Unfortunately, our plan didn't work out so great. John had been in the back room for about 15 minutes when I noticed Charlie push himself out from under a car and head toward the break room, which was right next to our 007 operation. I think I may have overcompensated on the volume when I yelled out, "Could you bring me a coffee?" because everyone else in the shop stopped what they were doing for a moment and looked in my direction. "Please?" I said in a softer tone.
"Get your own damn coffee!" Charlie yelled in kind, followed by a burst of laughter that everyone shared in before settling back to work. I trailed behind Charlie to the kitchen under the guise of getting my own damn coffee.
The problem was, sounds were muffled enough in the back room that John interpreted Charlie's response as an all-clear. His flash light flicked on and illuminated just enough of one corner of a shuttered window to get Charlie's attention.
"You see that, kid?" Charlie whispered and motioned for me to be quiet. "I think we have an intruder." He grabbed a heavy wrench from his back pocket and quietly twisted the door knob to the locked wing, which John had of course left open. "Idiot!" I immediately thought. I should never have trusted my kid brother with this. Seeing as fearless Charlie was about to run in and clobber my brother over the head, I had to come clean.
"Wait," I said to him, pulled him aside, and revealed our plan.
Charlie, when he finished laughing at our half-baked idea, insisted on being in on it. He pointed out a few obvious details that I hadn't considered, like how was I going to get the hydraulics running on the lifts? But he also kicked our vision up a notch by promising that he could not just have the wing cleaned up, but fully operational and stocked with all the necessary parts within the two months left before Dad's birthday. He could come in earlier on Sundays, send Dad home on slow nights, and pull a second shift. In fact, he even wanted to have some sort of ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open the new wing as part of the surprise for Dad, perhaps invite some key customers, maybe even the mayor, whom he knew personally.
It was a relief to have Charlie in the know and so excited about the project, since he knew what he was doing. At the same time, I was afraid Charlie would blow the surprise, too. He got so into it at times, he could barely contain himself. It reminded me of the time when I was 8 or 9 and I had saved up allowances to buy my mom a snow globe for Christmas. I showed it to John and swore him to secrecy. But the thrill of the secret was too much for him. First, he told mom that he knew what she was getting for Christmas and ran off in a fit of giggles which I then punched out of him. Then, he would drop mom some not so subtle hints by asking her if she liked snow