“You take better care of this machine than I do my own truck.”

He pulled a rag from his pocket and wiped a small smudge off the green fender.

“Why did you call me out here on a Tuesday night?” he asked.

“Someone told my father it needed eleven thousand dollars in repairs,” I said.

Joe stopped wiping the fender and looked at me in the dim light.

“Eleven thousand?” he asked.

“That was the number,” I said.

“You could buy a whole used engine for that,” Joe said.