I’m in love with a chain smoking Canadian named Rick

And I don’t care who knows it. I took Woody for a walk and the van was in the bay when I got back. So I sat down on one of the shitty chairs that only exist at the DMV and auto shops to wait for the verdict. Two days. Maybe next Thursday. Something like that probably. I was doing the math on okay I can rent a car but getting to the car rental place… Is there Uber in Canada and will a taxi let me bring Woody.

Then I heard my engine revving. And it sounded… good? I tried to not get excited. But Rick, the aforementioned chain smoking mechanic with beautiful blue eyes came into the office with a cigarette dangling from his lips and said, where the fuck is the knob for the heater in the back.

I said there is no knob. He didn’t believe me.

There’s no knob.

I showed him where the heater fan is in the back. Not connected to a damn thing. He cussed some and said “Okay. Well fuck me. Here’s the deal.” Showed me my water pump then chucked it across the garage. Said the heater core’s fucked but there’s fuckall you can do now. One of those lazy motherfuckers should’ve fixed that when you weren’t stranded in Canada. Said all the hoses were routed wrong and held down with fucking masking tape and a lot about “lazy piece of shit ah geez it’s so hard to do your fucking job” mechanics. The battery’s too goddamn big but whatever. Then he lit a cigarette off his zippo and realized he now had two lit smokes so he handed me one.

According to Rick, my new boyfriend, who’s putting off working on a lot of cars to get me back on the road, the water pump’s been shot for years, “don’t know how the fuck that ever fucking worked. Fucking piece of shit. Your t-stat’s stuck open but you got one working so that’s gonna have to do ya eh?” The heater core’s clogged too but “you should make it back to Texas where you can kick your own mechanic in the balls.” (Mother. Fuckers.)

He’s replaced the water pump. He’s rerouted all the hoses—“see that? That’s called fucking resistance. No wonder it gets clogged. Fucking pieces of shit”—so now the hoses feed to the dash so that actual heat comes out. Made me promise to find the engineer in Detroit who designed this piece of shit and kick him in the balls.

My van is fixed. Rick is married though. So I’ll probably head to Detroit and meet my girlfriend. Once Rick tells me the damage. He’s still out there revving the shit out of the van muttering about “I’ll tell you one thing about an engineer. Those bastards will crawl over fifty beautiful virgins to fuck a technician in the ass.”