Franky Kaczorowski is the best mechanic at the best foreign car repair shop in Port Richmond, so he doesn’t usually drive cars home to their owners, but this is a special case.
Arriving in front of the yellow-sided rowhouse on Mercer Street, where the Golubkas produce their delicious, authentic, very homemade, pierogis, Franky lets the engine run.
Let them hear it.
Yet before he twists the key out of the ignition, before he prepares to receive their praise, Franky experiences a hitch of doubt, subtler than the squeak of a faulty serpentine belt. That it might not work, that it might not be enough.
You fixed this car, he argues back to his doubt. You fixed this car, and you can fix the rest.
Franky is a big man and he has to work to extricate himself from the two-door Tercel, unfolding piece by piece, first his arms, next the thick stalks of his legs, then his long feet in their steel-toed boots, his parts popping up and out like the branches of an artificial Christmas tree.
Searching for dignity, he stands up straight and adjusts his clothes. He has on a work-issued coverall but over that, he wears a sweatshirt that’s a little too tight, Franky’s high school physique having expanded in the five years since graduation, thanks in part to all of those Golubka pierogis.
He smoothes the sweatshirt down so that the words are clear, so that Sylvia will read them.
“Franky, hey.” Alina Golubka is looking down at him from the covered brick porch. Alina and Sylvia are sisters but look nothing alike: Sylvia is tall and blonde, built strong and broad, like a wheat farmer from the old country, while Alina is slight, brown-haired, one of a crowd.
“Hey,” Franky says. “Is Sylvia home?”
Alina scurries down the stairs and stands in front of him, her dark head up to his chest. A kitchen smell, warm and herbal, radiates off of her. “She is, and she doesn’t want to see you.”
“But I fixed the car,” Franky says. When Franky imagined this day, as he rolled on his back under the Golubka’s Tercel, as he sat in mass next to his mother and recited the holy, holy, holies, both sisters came outside as witnesses to the miracle he had performed on their car.
“She’s still super pissed off at you,” Alina says. “You have to go.”
Adjust, Franky tells himself. Work with this. You’re here now, you’ve got to see it through, not run, not hide in your shell like a scared mollusc.
“Well, aren’t you going to say something about the car? The transmission in this thing was like nothing I’d ever seen. Any other shop woulda told you to sell it for scrap, but not me.” He pats the hood. “Runs like a top, now.”
When the Tercel died, whispering out a final sigh before its spirit flew over the rooves of the attached houses and kielbasa shops of the neighborhood like an angel going toward the light, Alina thought it was handy that Sylvia was dating a mechanic. After all, the Golubka sisters, who started up their business once Alina, the younger one, was through with school, relied on that car to deliver pierogis directly to their customers in the suburbs, where third- and fourth-generation people had houses locked behind gates but were no better than them: they, too, yearn to bite into the soft skins of fresh pierogis, taste the salt of sandy white cheese, the earthiness of forest mushrooms, and stand one step closer to God.
Franky promised he could have the car fixed in two weeks, max, but then, a week into that promise, Franky dumped Sylvia and Sylvia wouldn’t let Alina call the shop to ask about the car. The Golubkas lost Christmas business, selling only to neighborhood folks or those Alina could reach by bus, carting a wheely cooler full of thawing pierogis behind her.
On Mercer Street, Alina walks around the car, cocking her head in appreciation at the melodies emanating from under the hood.
At least somebody’s impressed.
“Thanks, Franky,” Alina says. “This is great. It’ll be great to have it back. Now tell me what we owe you.”
The words spurt out before Franky thinks. “Don’t worry about it. It’s on me.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. We can get you the money,” Alina says. A new wariness has crawled into her voice, like she’s expecting him to ask for something venial, which is not how this is supposed to go. He is here for Sylvia. He dumped her not because he didn’t love her, or because there was someone else, but because she doesn’t look or act how his friends and his mother thinks she should look and act.
His Sylvia is not a twig like Alina or the girlfriends of his friends, she’s not gooping up her face with makeup like his mother. Sylvia is solid and capable, face as smooth and supple as the pierogis she pinches together with her strong fingers before dropping them into boiling water. Sylvia wins every game from bowling to pool, had even wrestled on the team in high school, though that hadn’t lasted; the boys’ parents, at Port Richmond High and at the schools where they competed, refused to let their sons wrestle a girl and Sylvia had been forced to quit.
In dumping her, Franky became as bad as those parents, rejecting Sylvia because she didn’t fit the contours of the mold, and Franky knows he messed up, knows that Sylvia is perfect and knowing this makes Franky so hungry for her.
“For real, it’s on me. On one condition,” Franky adds, feeling a blush migrate from his neck to coalesce in pink continents on his cheeks. “If you ask Sylvia to come out here. Tell her I want to apologize, that I’d like another chance, if she’s willing.”
Before Alina can answer, Franky hears the hinges on the Golubka’s front door squeak open, and Sylvia, glorious in a red-and-black flannel, her breath coming out of her nose in misty streams, looks mad enough to rip out the porch’s wrought iron railing.
Before she can do it, Alina shouts up to her. “Syl, look! Franky fixed the car!” and two years from now, when Alina sits at the banquet room of the civic hall to celebrate the marriage of her sister Sylvia to Franky Kaczorowski, she will remember the look on Sylvia’s face when Franky showed up on Mercer Street wearing a Port Richmond High Wrestling sweatshirt stretched over his coverall. As wedding guests repeat the story of how Franky fixed an unfixable car and thereby won the girl, Alina will smile and nod but know that their reunion had nothing to do with the Tercel and everything to do with that Port Richmond High Wrestling sweatshirt, because although Sylvia is the type of woman who can crush a beer can in her fist, she is as gooey and sentimental as plum filling on the inside.
Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a lawyer-turned-writer living in Washington, DC. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Peatsmoke, Bending Genres, The Florida Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fictive Dream, and Best Microfiction 2022. Links to her writing are available at www.joannatheiss.com.