WD-40

The smell of WD-40 still reminds her of heartache. For nights after Tom left Amanda woke up thinking she felt the lens of his glasses on the back of her neck. Her mother told her it would be therapeutic to grow a garden, so she grow a 5 by 10 plot of all hot peppers, green, red, purple. Once, before taking a job at her father’s hardware store, she ate three of them whole to remind herself that she could still feel.

Farmers came into the store at 7 a.m. and taught Amanda the fine art of passing time through idle distractions: weather, animals, births, deaths, speculation. She went to the basement where the bike shop was and sorted live bait into tins—ten worms per tin. She pinched worms in half to see if they really grew back, to see if both ends of a worm could still squirm and grow if it was cut in two. They could.

At 11:00 her Uncle Ted took her to her piano lesson in his blue Ford pickup. They kicked up gravel on Dustman Road and he rambled on about Mexicans taking jobs and spreading tuberculosis. He went on about Democrats and Jesus and how if Jesus Christ ran against Hitler, and Jesus was a Democrat he’d still vote Republican.

Mrs. Reid’s piano room had red carpet and floor-to-ceiling curtains, white with red roses in full bloom. She wore a wide brimmed red hat. Mrs. Reid offered her sugar cookies and Sprite and cursed the meter of rock and roll under her breath. When she finally got to sitting on her stool she said to Amanda, “Now, Mandy, loosen your shoulders. The first thing you got to do when you sit down at your instrument is relax,” and she put a hand on her shoulder. The rope that held Mandy’s shoulders tight released letting them curve downward. “There,” she said, “And now we may begin.”

Every once in a while on the drive back to the hardware store, Uncle Ted said something brilliant. “This is the best time of your life you know.” She played with the fringe on her jean shorts. “The world is yours Amanda. You’re a young woman with nothin’ tyin’ you down.”

She stared at the cornfields. If she stopped her gaze she could see each row as it individually was, straight and narrow with nothing to distinguish a single one from the hundreds of others. They were planted to grow in neat rows, programmed to ripen at the same time and they followed this plan. Up to her thigh by the Fourth of July, to her left and right and ahead and behind. The strain of focusing her eyes on something still in a speeding truck made her dizzy. She could have thrown up. She thought she might scream something obscene or jump out the car door. What an inescapable quantity of such sameness! She relaxed her eyes and the rows went blurry.

“Soon enough you’ll have a husband and family and maybe a career. You’ll have great things, but those tie you down. You got the whole world to chase after. Now’s when you live on your own terms.” He rolled down the window and spat something onto the speeding highway. “You don’t owe anybody money, you don’t have mouths to feed. I know life’s looking empty right now with that boy and all,” What did he know about any boy? Hadn’t he shut up yet? “But it isn’t. It’s so full you hardly know what to do with it. You sit around that store assemblin’ vacuum cleaners, one day you’ll wake up with a life full of stuff you can’t get out of. You mark my word.” She didn’t say anything. She just tapped out some scales on her leg, lifting her ring finger extra high for the D flat.