Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

Things were good in the Achatz household.

I arrived home from school one afternoon when I was eleven to see what looked like a spaceship parked in my driveway. The sleek silver object glistened in the afternoon sun. The doors, hatch, and hood were all open. I ran up to the car, stuck my head in the window, and was struck by the smell of new-car leather. As I was pulling my head out to run around back, I heard my dad say, “Pretty cool, huh? Nineteen eighty-five Corvette. Check out the gauges. They light up like Knight Rider.”

My dad closed down the doors and the hood, and I hopped in the passenger seat. The engine rumbled. I was in heaven. He slowly backed out of the driveway and I heard my mom yell from the house, “Put your seat belts on! Don’t drive crazy!” We both laughed. My dad crept down the street away from our house and turned the corner—he was taking it easy while my mom could still see us.

And that moment, blasting down the road in a brand-new Corvette . . .

CHAPTER 2

My paternal grandfather died at forty, when my father was very young. I think my dad was determined to enjoy his success—after all, it was hard-won from hard work. Nothing was given to us, and we all contributed.

But my dad had a hard time with success.

My mother and father were married in August 1973, exactly eight months before I was born. It isn’t hard to do the math. My family was stable as long as the work was hard and steady, but marital turbulence was frequent during my childhood. My dad’s drinking was the source of many temporary separations between he and my mother, although I was largely unaware of the problems.

By 1986, three years after my parents’ restaurant opened, the stresses of running a demanding business coupled with my father’s increasingly heavy drinking led to a split that became a divorce. By this time I had graduated to working the line during the weekends, but once my parents separated, my mom stopped going to the restaurant, and so did I. The weekends that were normally filled with flipping pancakes, French toast, and hash browns were now consumed with riding dirt bikes and hunting with my cousin Tim at his house in the country. These were my first real idle weekends of just hanging out with friends in the neighborhood. But it didn’t seem as satisfying.

Throughout my parents’ separation and divorce, my mom shielded me from the issues surrounding my dad’s drinking. I didn’t know quite what was going on, I only knew that they still talked, that the restaurant still existed, and that my dad wasn’t around the house. In fact, I never saw him during the times he wasn’t living in the house. He visited rarely. He was either in or out, and when he was out he simply vanished.

Nearly a year later my father returned. Suddenly he was back, and we didn’t talk about the time away from each other. And for my part, I was just happy he had come home. As quietly as my parents divorced, they reconciled and were quickly remarried.

Everything became remarkably normal again.

In the spring of 1988, when I was fourteen, my dad asked me what kind of car I wanted when I turned sixteen. He loved cars, and he wanted me to love them too.

“A fast one,” I said.

My dad had the idea of buying an old muscle car and restoring it with me. I couldn’t have been more excited. I read about cars often and had a fairly good knowledge of the different makes from building 1:24-scale plastic models with my dad. He would guide me through the building process, but I was in charge of figuring out the instructions and doing the assembly. A dozen of these projects were lined up on my dresser, and you could see the progression of build-quality from early childhood on. The first one was the “General Lee” from the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. It had crooked decals and thick, drippy paint. The roll cage looked like it was melted because of the thick globs of glue that hung off of it.

Eager to find the first real car that I would build with my dad, I would ride my bike every week down to the Speedy Q gas station to pick up an Auto Trader. After searching for a few months we settled on a 1970 Pontiac GTO that was about a two-hour drive away in Flint, Michigan. My dad called the owner, who had a pole barn full of old muscle cars, and they haggled out a price of $1,400.

The GTO was not really a car at this point. It was disassembled and in about fifty boxes, but the guy promised my dad that all the parts were there. Sight unseen, we arranged for a flatbed wrecker to follow us to Flint to pick up the car, and Uncle Norm came along for the ride.

Just before we got there my dad looked at me and said, “Now don’t be disappointed when you see it, Grant. Remember, this thing is not even going to look like a car. It’s in a million pieces and the back fender is smashed in. I promise you, we are going to make this thing look like new, but it’s going to take real time and effort.”

As we hopped out of the pickup truck the owner of the pieces came out of his house and greeted us with a firm handshake. As we walked back to the barn he looked at me and said, “So, son. Is this going to be your car?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“You know what kind of car it is?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It’s a Goat. This one should have a ‘YS’ stamped 400, right?” That referred to the code on the engine block with a