The visit is explained. Irritated, Dennis gets up and goes outside without a word. The thing is, he’s over a barrel; the freeways are in fact dangerous, and if he refuses to fix Jim’s car and tries to make him learn to do a little work of his own, then next thing he knows he’ll get a call from the CHP to tell him the fool’s car has failed and he’s dead inside, and then Dennis will have to wish that he’d done the damn repair. So he drives the thing into the garage and goes at it, unscrewing the box over the switcher mechanism by the light of a big lamp set next to him on the floor.

Jim follows him into the garage and sits on the floor to watch. Dennis slides back and forth on the floor-sled, putting all the screws in one spot, testing the magnetic function of all the points in the switcher … ah. Two are dead, two more barely functional, and commands are being transferred right on through to the right-turn points, which explains the problem. Small moment of satisfaction as he solves the little mystery, which wasn’t, after all, so mysterious. Anyone could have found it. Which returns him to his irritation with Jim. There he sits, spaced out in his own thoughts, not learning a thing about the machine he relies on utterly to be able to lead his life. Dennis sighs heavily. As he replaces the points with spares of his own (and they’re expensive) he says, “Are you doing anything about getting a full-time job?”

“Yeah, I’ve been looking.”

Sure. Besides, what kind of job is he fit to apply for? Here he’s been going to college for years, and so far as Dennis can tell, he isn’t qualified to do anything. Clerk work, a little marginal night school teaching … can that really be it? Dennis gives a screw a hard twist. What can Jim do? Well … he can read books. Yes, he can read books like nobody’s business. But Dennis can read a book too, and he didn’t go to college for six years to learn how. And meanwhile, here he is out on his back after an eleven-hour day, fixing the kid’s car!

Time to make him help. “Look here, take that point and reach down from above and insert it into this slot here,” pointing up with the screwdriver.

“Sure, Dad.” And Jim moves around the motor compartment, blocking the floor lamp’s light, and leans down into it, the point between his fingers. “There we go—oops!”

“What’d you do?”

“Dropped it. But I can see where it went—down between the motor and the distributor—just a sec—” And he’s leaning down, stretched out over the motor, blocking Dennis’s light.

“What’re you doing?”

“Just about—uh-oh—”