My father stood with both hands resting on the edge of the open hood, staring into the engine compartment of the truck in the Ecklund Chevrolet lot.

"Well?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away. He leaned a little closer, studying whatever he could see beneath the plastic covers and wiring.

"There's a lot going on in here."

That was about as close as my father came to admitting he didn't immediately understand something mechanical.

I stood beside him and looked down. "Too much plastic?"

He glanced at me. "I didn't say that."

"You were thinking it."

My father was a wizard with small engines. He was the go-to person in town if you had an issue with a lawnmower or a weed trimmer, and I'd watched him examine enough engines over the years to recognize the process. He wasn't searching for anything in particular. He was figuring out where everything was, what connected to what, and how much trouble it would be when something eventually stopped doing what it was supposed to do.

Dad had always believed cars were meant to be understood, not merely driven.

"You remember my first car?" I asked.

"Of course."

We'd found it in the classifieds in the Pioneer Press. I'd been sixteen and had enough money saved to buy a car, provided my definition of car was flexible.

The body wasn't pretty. Minnesota winters had seen to that. Salt had eaten away at the bottoms of the doors and worked its way around the wheel wells. Dad had spent more time underneath it than behind the wheel before telling me what he thought.

The engine was fine. That part didn't worry him. The rust did.

I can help you with anything under the hood, he'd told me. I can't put the body back around it.

But it fit my budget, and at sixteen I wasn't buying sheet metal. I was buying freedom. Dad had finally given his approval with a warning:

Take care of it, and it'll get you from Point A to Point B. And hopefully back again.

Three weeks later, I took a highway corner sharper than I should have, and one of the rusted mounting points for the front suspension finally gave way.

The rust had already done most of the damage. I just hadn't understood yet that owning that particular car meant treating it with more care than I'd given it. The engine still ran fine, exactly as Dad had said it would. The rest of the car just wasn't safe enough to put back on the road.

I'd been devastated, and I'd waited for the I told you so. It never came.

The Toyota was next. An old Corolla a neighbor was willing to give me after his daughter drove it without transmission fluid and did enough damage that the car wasn't worth paying someone to repair. My father saw it differently.

I remembered standing in the garage while he looked underneath it, wondering why we'd bothered dragging home somebody else's dead Toyota.

Man put it together. Man can take it apart, fix it, and put it back together.

That was his motto.

And we had. With Dad's help, a vehicle somebody else had given up on became my second car.

He stared beneath the Silverado's hood for a few seconds longer, and I wondered if modern engineering had finally made him reconsider that particular mantra.

As he lowered the hood carefully, the solid thump brought another car to mind.

His Cadillac DeVille.

For just a moment, I was in the back seat again, heading north to Duluth with my parents, Johnny Cash singing "Folsom Prison Blues" through the eight-track player. I couldn't have told you what we'd talked about on that drive or even how old I'd been. But I remembered the sound of Cash's voice. The enormous back seat. My mother's profile against the passenger window and Dad behind the wheel.

Funny what stayed with you.

I'd spent enough time surrounded by records to understand that music mattered because it could take you somewhere else. Sometimes it took you somewhere you'd already been.

Dad ran his hand once along the Silverado's front fender.

"Nice truck."

"Yeah."

Every truck I'd owned had belonged to somebody else first. They came with scratches I hadn't made, dents I couldn't explain, and miles of somebody else's life already behind them. I'd never owned a new one. There was something strange about looking at a truck without a history. If it ever became mine, every scratch would have a story I knew.

Dad walked around to the driver's side and looked through the window.

"You like it?" he asked.

I looked at the dark blue paint, still clean enough to reflect both of us standing beside it.

"I could."

He nodded.

"Then you've got something to think about."

He started toward his car.

I stayed where I was, looking at the Silverado a moment longer.

He wasn't wrong.