Limited Warranty

Max Du

When my parents came to America, their first car was a 1990 Toyota Corolla, with white body and headliner that flaked at the touch. Before we gave it to Kars4Kids, my mom would open up its dusty doors and let me clamber around. I would scratch at the old fabric and watch the dust run through my fingers. “That’s enough,” my mom would say. “It’s bad for your lungs.”

The second and third cars were both Volkwagens. They bought them after I was born. My dad had a red Jetta, and my mom had a Passat the color of the summer sky at its highest point. Every spring, we took a weekend to pump our cars on jacks and change our own oil. Mom would let my dad loosen the oil filter with these massive pliers, but she wouldn’t let him touch the drainage bolt on the underbelly of the cars. “It takes so much skill to apply so much pressure without breaking the screw,” she would say while laying prone.

When the cars started breaking down, we stopped changing the oil together. The Jetta had a bad muffler and failed inspection one year. I think I was in sixth grade, then. Mom didn’t believe a muffler could cost so much, and they got into an argument. It ended with my dad driving home after work with an entirely new exhaust assembly that cost more than three thousand dollars. As soon he told my mom, he slipped out the front door and into the woods. I ran after him, saying “geda, you can’t do this to mom. Why didn’t you discuss this?”

Looking back, this was pretty funny. Me dressed in school clothes, him in his professorial button-up, and my mom running after both of us in the clothes she made on weekends with clearance fabrics from Joann’s. We bumbled through the wild raspberry bushes and eventually came home. Things settled down by dinnertime.

When my dad stopped sleeping with my mom, he turned his office into a bedroom. Every morning I’d hear the shuffling of blankets and chairs in that room. When he finally opened his door, there was no sign that he’d slept there, other than a pillow and sheets he tucked into a suitcase. It seemed like he was always ready to leave.

He’d spend his days in his university office and nights in that upstairs room, typing lines and lines of computer code. When mom found the occasion to remind him of his own mom who insulted her once, or the “miami woman” affair he had when I was a baby my dad would slip on a pair of studio headphones and pull the volume all the way up. Sometimes, this happened downstairs while he cooked dinner, and I would hear through the headphone seals some Chinese pop music. I didn’t know he liked Chinese pop music.

In my mind, my dad is always running away. He’s always picking through the spring weeds of the woods behind our house, always wearing headphones, always staying in that little cell of a room with streaks of grime on the wall. And as I grew older, that was all I expected. After every argument, I’d expect my dad to pull off his headphones, walk downstairs, and ask my mom if she’d thawed the pork that morning. Unstable systems find new stable equlibria. I wanted to believe that my family was drifting towards equilibrium too. Everything I saw around me was noise along the way. So I found it surprising in moments when we seemed to drift further away.

It was early summer of my seventh grade, my dad drove home with a new car, another Jetta, dark gray like good steel. Our Passat had an engine issue, and our old Jetta had a cooling issue. They’d spent the past week talking about a new car and they couldn’t agree on something. One day later, he swung by a dealership and signed all the papers by himself.

Dad was making ribs for dinner. He had his hands in the bowl, kneading the marinade into the meat. My mom stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on her hips with a contorted look on her face that often appeared when they bickered.

“How could you be so selfish?”

“Is it selfish to want to drive to work?” he said. “I can’t drive the old cars anymore. I fear for my safety.”

I was in the kitchen between them like I often did. I felt that I could channel the energy between my two parents and moderate it somehow, but I usually made it worse.

“How could you buy a whole car without telling us?” I asked him.

“And you didn’t even let us choose the color,” my mom said. “Son, you don’t like that color, do you?”

I would have wanted a blue car, blue like that summer sky. My dad stopped kneading the meat.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

Then he cast the bowl away and let the pieces of meat fly against the tiled kitchen wall. They left trails of blood and soy sauce and pepper, oozing down the ceramic.

“Oh my god,” I remember saying. “I’m going to call 911.”

“Call 911 if you want,” my dad said, washing his hands. “I really don’t care anymore.”

He didn’t come back until sundown. I thought he’d gone to return the car, like my mom was trying to get him to do.

I later found out what my dad really did. He was sitting on the other side of our garage door. Summer bakes the garage to an intolerable heat, but he sat there for nearly an hour. He didn’t have his headphones. He sat in the dark and the silence on the steps. Like all these times, I didn’t join him.

Mom cooked the ribs that night. Dad was still on the other side of the door when we ate. She picked up a bone and gnawed the meat from it. “Son, have a rib,” she said. “They’re really good today.”