The Progress of Love

was a teacher, too, a primary specialist—because of being pregnant with Lynnette, she took on the job of managing the laundromat so that they could live rent free and save money. They talked then about moving—right away, to someplace remote and adventurous-sounding like Labrador or Moosonee or Yellowknife. They talked about going to Europe and teaching the children of Canadian servicemen. Meanwhile this house came up for sale, and it happened to be a house Glenna had always looked at and wondered about when she took Lynnette for a walk in the carriage or stroller. She had grown up in Air Force bases all over the country, and she loved to look at old houses.
    Now, Glenna said, with all the work there was to do on this place, it looked as if they knew where they’d be and what they’d be doing forevermore.
    Ross had two cars to wreck and one to build. The Chevy was a 1958 model that had been in an accident. The windshield was smashed, and the radiator and fan shoved back on the engine. The wiring was burned. Ross hadn’t been able to tell how the engine ran until he got the fan and the radiator and the banged-up sheetmetal out of the way. Then he hot-wired it and filled the block with water. It ran. Ross said he knew it would. That was what he had bought the car for, the body being so damaged it was no use to him. The body he was using belonged to a 1971 Camaro. The top coat of paint had fallen off in sheets when he used the stripper, but now he was having to work with the hose and scouring pads on what was underneath. He was going to have to take out the dents in the roof with a body hammer and cut out the rusted sections of the floorboards to put in an aluminum panel. That and a lot more. It looked as if the job might take all summer.
    Right now Ross was working on the wheels, with Glenna helping him. Glenna was polishing the trim rings and center caps, which had been taken off, while Ross scoured the wheels themselves and went over them with a wire brush. Lynnette was in her playpen by the front door.
    Colin sniffed the air for stripper. Ross didn’t use a respirator; he said you didn’t need to in the fresh air. Colin knew he should trust Glenna not to expose herself and Lynnette to that. But he sniffed, and it was all right; they hadn’t been using any stripper. To cover up, he said, “Smells like spring.”
    “You don’t need to tell me,” said Glenna, who was subject to hay fever. “I can feel the clouds of pollen just getting ready to move in.”
    “Did you get your shots?” said Colin.
    “Not today.”
    “That was dumb.”
    “I know,” said Glenna, polishing like mad. “I was going to walk over to the hospital. Then I got fooling around with these and I got sort of hypnotized.”
    Lynnette walked cautiously around the sides of her playpen, holding on, then lifted her arms and said, “Up, Dad.” Colin was delighted with the firm, businesslike way she said “Dad”—not “Da” as other babies did.
    “What I’ve decided I’m going to do,” said Ross. “I’m going to put on a rust remover that’s a conditioner and then a conversion coating and then a primer. But I got to get every last bit of the old filler out, because the stripper could’ve got into it and it’d looklike a mess through the new paint. I’m going to use acrylic lacquer. What do you think?”
    “What color?” said Colin. He was talking to two rear ends, both in jeans. Glenna’s jeans were cutoffs, baring her long, powdery-white legs. No sign of either hat on Ross now. He sobered up remarkably whenever he got near his car.
    “I was thinking yellow. Then I thought red always looks good on a Camaro.”
    “We’ll get the paint chart and hold it up in front of Lynnette and let her choose,” said Glenna. “Okay, Ross? Whatever she points to? Will we do that?”
    “Okay,” said Ross.
    “She’ll point to red. She loves red.”
    “Take it easy,” said Colin to Lynnette as he went past her into the house. She started to complain, not too seriously. He got three bottles of beer out of the refrigerator. During the winter, they had worked inside the house, pulling off wallpaper and tearing up linoleum, and they had got the place now to a stage where all the innards were showing. There were batts of pink insulating material held in place under sheets of plastic. Piles of lumber to be used in the new partitions sat around drying. You walked on springy wide boards in the kitchen. Ross had shown up regularly to