Free What You Have Left by Will Allison Page B

face when I tell her she’s in the clear. And then, curiosity getting the best of me, I decide to take a chance.
    â€œThat girl this morning,” I say. “She’s his daughter.”
    This gets his attention. “No kidding?” he says. “Girlie nearly run me over.”
    â€œReally?” I apologize for any trouble Holly caused, hand him twenty bucks, and tell him to keep the change. Then, as I’m explaining that Holly hasn’t seen her father in years, another mechanic comes walking out of the service bay.Even before I look, I know it’s Wylie. I can picture him hanging back in the shadows, listening, waiting to make sure I’m not whoever it is he’s hiding from these days— parole officer, tax man, his own daughter. “Thanks, Gene,” he says, taking a rag to my windshield. “I’ll finish this one up.”
    From the start, Holly said if I loved her, I’d help her find her father, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just went off to work each day, telling myself I was giving her space, hoping she’d hurry up and find him or else give up—mostly hoping she’d give up. I resented the time she spent making calls, writing letters, poring over that notebook. Some nights, when I came home beat from the old house I’d been working on, she hardly seemed to notice I was there. I told her she was wasting her time, that Wylie would have found
her
if that’s what he wanted, but after a couple drinks, she’d tell me I couldn’t possibly understand, seeing as how I still had a father in my life. Then she’d start making excuses for Wylie, saying how brokenhearted he must have been over losing her mother. I kept quiet, but I pictured a guy who never wanted a kid in the first place, a guy who’d turned tail and run first chance he got.
    Which is why, standing there at the gas pump, I’m so surprised that Wylie chooses to show his face—and even more surprised when he invites me to lunch at the diner down the street. He offers to drive, tells me to leave my keys in case Gene needs to move the car. At the restaurant, we settle into a booth and order the special, barbecue hash and coleslaw.
    â€œWell,” Wylie says, “you’re no old friend of mine, so you must be the boyfriend.” He reaches across the table toshake my hand. He has Holly’s freckles and red hair. He doesn’t look like a guy who lives at the bottom of a bottle. His eyes are clear. His grip is a crescent wrench. “She send you up here to look for me?”
    I still haven’t decided whether finding him is a good thing or not, but I want to see him squirm. “She’s been after you like a bloodhound.”
    â€œWhy?”
    I shrug. “Her grandfather—Cal—died.”
    â€œAnd what does that have to do with me?”
    â€œYou’d have to ask her,” I say.
    If I come off as rude, Wylie doesn’t seem to hold it against me. In fact, when the food arrives, he asks me to tell him all about Holly, which is how we pass the next half hour, me trying to fill him in on the last fifteen years of her life. The fact that she’s at Carolina, that she drives a pickup, that she wants to be a veterinarian—all of this pleases him. He’s so engrossed, he barely touches his lunch, and sitting there across from him, seeing how he hangs on every detail, it’s hard not to like the guy. I imagine most people who meet him must feel the same way—the housewives whose cars he fixes, the bartenders who pour him free shots, people who haven’t yet known him long enough or well enough to be disappointed. When I tell him how torn up she is over Cal, he gazes out across the parking lot and lights a smoke. There was a time, he says, years ago, when he wanted Holly to come live with him in Myrtle Beach, but by then, Cal wouldn’t let him near her, wouldn’t even let him talk to her on the phone.