The Raising of Serendipity

Two days after Christmas, I trudged downtown in my big snow boots, to say goodbye to Serendipity.

The ground was mud and slush. The sky was drizzle and slush. The whole world had the consistency of a bowl of overcooked rice abandoned in the back of the fridge. Everyone I saw was miserable in that way you can only be miserable two days after Christmas on a slushy afternoon. I was the most miserable of all.

I had already paid the mechanic the day before. But I couldn’t afford a tow until today.

The mechanic had given my beloved Serendipity a terminal diagnosis. He said that the car which had looked so beautiful in the used car lot was a mess inside, with a junkyard motor and wiring all melted and fused. I don’t know the first thing about cars. I got my driver’s license at thirty-six and bought my first car the next year– that car was also a piece of junk. I thought I’d done my due diligence by taking Serendipity to the mechanic for a checkup before I bought her, but apparently I’d been tricked. The mechanics and car dealers on that strip of road outside Pittsburgh all know each other. There were lemon laws and fraud laws, but it’s not as if I can afford a lawyer.

The Lost Girl had offered to have me tow the car to her apartment complex, because there’s more than enough parking there and security cameras everywhere. No one would bother my car at the complex. Her uncle who works in a junkyard would come over and perform what I assumed would be a post mortem. Then, I assumed, I would scrap Serendipity, and get used to having no car. Lord knows when we could afford another. It would be the dreary Steubenville bus line, no trips to Pittsburgh, no going back to Columbus, unless we won the lottery. And I was too embarrassed to ever think about buying a car again, anyway. A hopeless failure like me would only buy a third lemon.

It took two hours for the tow truck to arrive. Now that the Christmas ice emergency was over, wreckers were needed all over town. I sat in a coffee shop, nursing a black cold brew, sulking.

“Mechanics lie all the time to try to get more money,” the Lost Girl assured me, but I didn’t have much hope.

Finally, the tow truck arrived.

“Can it be turned on at all?” he asked.

“They told me the electricity is completely dead,” I said.

“I’ll use the jumper box.”

I gave him the key.

Imagine my shock when Serendipity started, without the jumper box.

There was a billow of white steam and a smell like paint thinner as he drove her onto the truck.

“It started fine,” he said, chaining her into place. “I wouldn’t trust driving it, though.”

I paid him in advance and gave him the address of the Lost Girl’s apartment, and my car disappeared down Market Street.

At home, the Lost Girl and her visiting father had quite a time moving the car into the right parking space. “They didn’t give us the key, only the fob.”

I explained how to start a car with keyless entry, something I hadn’t known myself until October. They drove the car into the space, at which point the battery instantly died.

“Your alternator’s completely dead, they were right about that,” said the Lost Girl.

She and her father began poking at the car before her uncle got there. The whole family has been driving five hundred dollar jalopies on the back roads of northern Appalachia for as long as there have been cars. They know how to fix them. The Lost Girl was quietly teaching herself to drive as a very young teenager, in order to get to work and get paid under the table so her children could stay alive, and she’s been teaching herself to do car maintenance ever since.

The next morning, I had another text. “We found what was wrong with your car! The plug that goes from the engine to the alternator is fried.”

Those were just words to me, gibberish. But she’d already called her favorite junkyard and ordered a new plug, with money stored in her cash app that was meant for the deposit on her new apartment.. She also chided that the car was bone dry of fluids and I’d have to learn how to check them, and she got some oil and antifreeze from Walmart when she did the day’s shopping. I quickly sent her some money to pay for those things.

I told her the other mysteries about the car: the odd smell coming out of the vent every once in awhile when I turned the air conditioning on. The way it sometimes jerked when I hit the gas at a green light. She promised to tell her uncle when he got there.

When the uncle came, he worked on the car every dry afternoon for a week. Serendipity needed the alternator. She needed two new wires and that plug. She needed a bracket to hold all these things in place, or the plug would fall out again when I drove over a bump. The jerking, it turns out, was because the brakes were metal to metal. I didn’t know brakes had a part that was supposed to go between the metal parts. If you put a collection of car parts in front of me, I don’t think I could point to the brake or tell you if the brake was right or wrong.  I just nodded at him.

The smell I’d told him about, turned out to be a hole in the exhaust. I shuddered, thinking of the times I’d felt a little carsick while driving Serendipity when I don’t usually ever get carsick. I wondered what would have happened if the leak had gotten worse.

If the alternator hadn’t stopped working when it did, I might have ended up driving Adrienne and tiny Mcfluff for three hours to visit Aunt Holly and Aunt Reese in Columbus the day after Christmas, and I don’t know what would have happened. Maybe nothing. Maybe a disaster.

Maybe there’s a reason the car was named Serendipity.

I am going to get the car today or tomorrow, with all the new electrical parts inside. The Lost Girl will show me how to check the fluids and how to drive downhill in second gear so as not to make the brakes even worse just now. I’ll drive very gently back to my house and park, and leave her there undriven for a week or two until the Lost Girl’s uncle has a free afternoon to put new brakes in. The Lost Girl is calling around to find the cheapest brakes and I can pay her back again.  As soon as the brakes are in, I can drive with the windows open just five minutes to the muffler shop the Lost Girl recommended, to get the exhaust fixed. Then Serendipity will have a clean bill of health. Holly has invited us out to see her in February, for a do-over of our ruined Christmas.

We’ll be riding the bus for a little bit, but then we’ll have our freedom back.

The thing I’ve always wanted and so rarely gotten, is community. Family. A collection of people to know and to love and to serve without quid pro quo: not because you’ll go to hell if you don’t, but because it’s good to do so and because we like each other. Not with the promise of berating and emotional torture hanging over your head if you need too much, but readily and eagerly every time because we all know how hard life is. A place where everybody gets to use their gifts and be helpful, but no one is treated as a burden if they’re not useful. Where people who are very different delight in each other’s differences instead of shunning one another. Where things tend to go right, not because we’re in a magical world where misfortune doesn’t happen, but because we pull together and help.

Next month I will be driving to Columbus again, and the Lost Girl will be safe in her new house.

This, too, is serendipity.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.