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April Salzano
An Impact Wrench is Not
a sound I thought I would ever miss from those days
I lived beside the small town mechanic’s shop.
But I do. Its definitive finality, its crescendo,
the distinct pause between lug nuts, between wheels,
between cars. It was a sound I could count on,
sunrise to sunset when the shop closed for the day,
the grease-covered men went home to dinner,
the father who owned the place, the son
who never went to college, and the third, expendable,
nameless fellow with the beat-up pickup truck
and the suggestion of loneliness. I nursed my son
to that sound, curtains on the east side
of the house usually closed, but I would peer
between the slats of the plantation shutters sometimes
when I was lonely and bored, toward the end
of my marriage, kids napping, laundry folded
in its outdoor-fresh scented squares of domesticity.
I found comfort in watching the customers
who walked to pick up their cars, then pulled away,
never in any kind of hurry, back to the college
campus up the street, to the failing coffee shop
on the corner, to the town’s one hair salon or market.
I hear it now, my second husband rotating my tires,
my youngest boy eight years old, playing various
electronic devices whose names and games I cannot keep
track of, my oldest upstairs more than he is down,
and I wonder how it happened that I am suddenly forty
and do not live anywhere near the fix-it shop,
existing in another town, another life entirely.
February 2014 33