“Okay, here we go. Ratchet’s up first.” I wiggle it in the limited space between us to show her what it is.
She gives me a patient smile. “I’m familiar with something similar in design.”
I tip my chin to acknowledge this. “You work on spaceships?”
Her smile grows a little wistful. “Yes. With my brother, Tahmoh. He’s quite scholarly in nature, usually preferring to have his snout between the pages of a book. But he also loves ships and spends equal time in the belly of whatever homely little creation he’s attempting to return to the sky.”
“Nice,” I tell her and roll further under the pumpkin, positioning myself to tap the fill cap. “All right,” I murmur, getting my head in gear for the job at hand. “You always check to be sure you can remove this cap here. Because if it’s rusted shut to where you can’t, and you make the mistake of emptying your fluid from below, you’re going to find yourself with no way to refill it, and now you can’t drive anywhere.” I gesture to the near pristine underside. “Not a true concern since she’s babied, but it’s a habit best kept sharp.” I roll out and let Inara move in to see for herself, because she seems genuinely interested.
As she peers at it with concentration, as if she’s memorizing what it looks like and what information I’ve given her, my chest tightens. Besides my grandad, I’ve never had anyone to work on cars with. This is cool.
When Inara shifts to roll out, I place my hand on her thigh, making her firm flesh jump. “You want to loosen it?” I ask her. And she doesn’t know it, but I’ve never offered for anyone to touch this car. I’ve never trusted any guy enough not to fuck around with it, and I’ve never had a woman show interest. Not with maintenance. If they wanted to do anything, it was to drive it. And that’s always been a solid nope.
“I would love to!” Inara nearly gushes, and she takes the ratchet from me with all the ceremony one observes when accepting the first pass of the Olympic torch.
When she rolls back with the drain cap, I hand her a red shop rag. “Wipe off the crud. Yep, perfect. Look at that. That’s some buildup of metal flakes.” A lot of people don’t do anything with their rear differential, because they think they don’t have to. You could drive a hundred and fifty thousand miles without ever flushing all the ground up metal bits and filthy, burnt-up gear oil your car has been choking on.
You could. You could go to sleep at night never worrying about how you let that oil burn up, let that friction build and build, because a car is built to deal with it. But then you’re leaving your driveshaft’s pinion gear to grind the ever-living fuck out of the ring gear, and all the spider gears to crunch up their housing. Meanwhile, you’re taking corners wondering where that odd whine is coming from and why it seems to be getting worse and worse. I guarantee you that when your gears lock up while you’re smack in the middle of traffic, you’re gonna lose your shit.
Or, you could just bite the bullet and change your own damn differential fluid. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s not too difficult. And if you’re thinking your mechanic will do it, good luck with that. When my grandpa was a young man, he paid through the nose for the service, but when he looked at his car later, he didn’t see any sign that they’d ever opened the diff cover.
He stuck his finger in the fill-hole, pulled out a putrid pinky, and he drove back to that mechanic, rolled his car into the bay without permission, and proceeded to change his gear oil using the mechanic’s tools.
He got a stuttered apology and a refund, but that day he also learned the golden lesson: if you want something done right—and sometimes, if you need to be sure it’s actually been done at all—do it your damn self.
And that’s why he drilled me on doing everything with this car. We took it apart and put it back together until I should have been able to claim an honorary degree in Rubik’s cube solving by the time I was seventeen. (Because Ford parts are fun like that.) But the result of all that? I can just about take care of the Boss, my family’s pride and joy, in my sleep.
Inara peers at the dimpled side of the threaded fitting. Then she eyes the accumulation of metal flakes that were caked on it. “This must possess a magnetic field?”
“It does,” I confirm, giving her a more lengthy perusal, liking what I see: keen eyes and genuine curiosity. “You can put it back. No need to do more than tighten it with your fingers for now. We’ll get it snug at the end.”
We remove all but one of the diff cover’s bolts next, drain the foul-smelling swill, pop the cover off entirely, and make liberal use of my can of brake cleaning fluid.
The gasket is revealed, and it comes up easy, meaning we only need to attack the cover with cleaner fluid and rags, no sanding required. Maintenance on a classic is pretty low-key, all things considered, due to the fact that loving owners don’t let their cars get rusty or road-fugly.
“Now for the differential,” I announce, scooting my creeper so that Inara can get in tight beside me. Our shoulders brush, and feeling her soft and warm against me is giving me a really different headspace than when I’ve been under this car with my grandad. “We need to clean anything left of the gasket off here, the mating surface,” I explain, running my fingers over the flat metal rim edging the differential’s housing. “And we do it carefully without scratching it, or you can count on leaks later,” I stress, eyeing her claws. “You’ve been careful with your Wolverines so far,” I spread my grease-stained fingers into Logan-claws to demonstrate, “but I thought I’d mention it.”
She nods, and I hand her a plastic scraper and let her gently flake up gasket parts, and I spray a rag with brake cleaner and apply it gently to wipe them away.
We liberally hit the differential with cleaner too, and then it’s time to fit the new gasket in place, line up the bolts, and get her back together.
“Time to fill this with fresh fluid?” Inara asks, gaze revealing an authentically acute interest.
“Time to refill her with fresh gear fluid and a good ‘ol Ford additive,” I confirm. I move for the first quart—but a muscled weight snakes over my abdomen and reaches for the container, curling around it, hauling it right up to the fingers of my outstretched hand.
It’s Inara’s tail. She’s reached over me with it and brought me what we needed.
I exhale a breath. “Wow.”
The surprisingly heavy length of her scale-covered blue limb scrunches like it’s a little embarrassed and starts to draw itself off of me.
“Wait,” I say, catching it with as delicate a grip as I can manage, because my fingers are grimy and I don’t want to make her dirtier than she already is. “This is handy,” I tell her, because it is, and because I feel bad that I inadvertently made her self-conscious. “Thanks. We’re going to use this again in a second.”
She gives me a glance that tells me she’s unsure if I’m being sincere or not.
“Oh, you can believe I’m going to put something as flexible and articulate as this to work,” I promise her, giving her tail a flick. “Watch.”
To refill the pumpkin, each bottle of diff fluid has to be fitted with tubing that gets fed into the fill hole. The diff bottle has to be held aloft, upside down, waiting for each one to drain. It takes a while. A long while. And this needs to be done two and a half times.