Free Kiss the Morning Star by Elissa Janine Hoole

in my mouth, poised behind the fence of my teeth, unable to form my lips around the syllables for fear of how the words will twist during the passage.
    Here is a secret: I wonder if she’s right about Pastor Shepherd—that I’m afraid he’ll make me believe again. And if that’s not it, what am I afraid of?
     
     
    I ease the car into the parking lot of the garage. The oil light came on about twenty-five miles ago, and we spent another ten or fifteen minutes driving around the tiny town of Gillette, Wyoming, searching for a mechanic. At four thirty on a Saturday afternoon, this little quick-change oil place looks to be our only option.
    The tall guy in coveralls who walks into the tiny waiting room has nice eyes and a black smudge of grease along his left cheekbone. His face also reveals a five o’clock shadow and wistful thoughts of quitting time. “Hello,” he says, wiping his hands on a rag so grimy it can’t possibly be helping the situation. “You got here just in time. I was on my way out to turn off the sign.” He nods toward the neon sign in the window.
    I flash a nervous smile, and wait for Kat to turn on the charm, to get this boy wrapped around her finger and ready to spend his evening solving the puzzle of our car trouble, but Kat flops down in one of the plastic chairs and leaves it to me.
    “So what’s it going to be?” asks the mechanic. “Standard oil change? Air filter?” He smiles, seeing my nervousness. “Oh, it’s okay, don’t worry. I’ll stay to get you set up. If I don’t, I dunno where you’d get an oil change ’round here till Monday.”
    “I think—” I say, and my voice sounds far away and wrapped in layers of gauze. “I think maybe we have some bigger problems?”
    His eyes stray for just a tiny fraction of a second toward the front window, toward that sign he must wish he had unplugged ten minutes ago, but he remains professional. “All righty. Well, let’s take a look. Pull her into the first bay there, okay?”
    I toss the keys to Kat. I hate driving into garages, especially the kind with the big hole in the middle of the floor. Even when I go super slow, I can’t imagine how I’ll avoid crashing into the door or dropping a portion of my vehicle into the pit. I wander over to the coffee pot and sniff at it once before pouring myself a Styrofoam cup full. My mom and I used to tease my dad about what a coffee snob he was—Mom would do things like microwaving old cups of coffee just to drive him nuts. To me it mostly all tastes the same. Still I find myself imitating his habits—sniffing the brew as though I will turn it down if it has been on the burner all afternoon, when in reality I would probably drink it even if it were mostly solid.
    After a while, Kat comes back in looking worried. “So it turns out we were supposed to stop driving the car when the oil light came on,” she says.
    “I told you!” I had, indeed, advocated for immediate stopping, but Kat had insisted we keep going.
    “Well, apparently the oil is kind of necessary. And we don’t really have any left. Something about the plug in the oil pan leaking or maybe it’s missing?”
    “Missing?” I squeeze my arms in front of my chest, holding myself together. “I mean, wouldn’t all the oil just pour right out?”
    “Well, yes, Anna babe. That’s why we don’t have any left.” Kat flops down on the chair again and picks up an old fishing magazine. She shrugs. “I guess it wasn’t all the way gone. The guy says the plug was like, in pieces. So some of the pieces were still all stuck in there, which slowed the oil down some. He says he got all the pieces out.”
    “Well, now what? Can he just put another plug in, fill it up, and off we go?” I look outside at the bleak gray sky, the scrubby expanse of parking lots and fields that line both sides of the road as far as the eye can see. “I mean, we can’t stay here until Monday. Where would we even sleep?”
    Kat pulls her hands through