The sign above my garage door says CRAIG’S AUTO REPAIR in red letters.
My sons painted it.
Rick was seven and Noah was four. I bought a sheet of plywood at the hardware store and two cans of paint, white and red, and laid the plywood across two sawhorses in the empty garage. I drew the letters in pencil. The boys filled them in.
Noah painted the C in CRAIG’S. He went outside the lines on every side. There’s a red smudge in the corner shaped like his whole hand, because he leaned on it before it was dry. Rick did the rest, very carefully, with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He spelled REPAIR with the P backward at first and cried when he saw it. I told him we’d fix it. We painted over the P in white and he did it again.
You can still see the ghost of the backward P under the right one, if you stand close.
I could have paid somebody to make a real sign. A metal one, with lights. I didn’t want a real sign. I wanted that one.
Every morning, when I unlock the garage at six-thirty, I look up at it. The smudgy C. The ghost of the backward P. And I remember why I’m doing this…. Tap below to continue full story
