Page 16 of Rowdy and Willing

“Uh? Huh? Is something on fire?”

“No, no, our oil applicator is here!”

She runs down the stairs as I bring it to the dining room table. I open the package and reveal what’s inside.

“Our invention. All professional and shiny-looking, made for mass use, ready to be put in thousands upon thousands of cars, tractors, trucks, and everything else.”

I hold it up to admire it, Windy looking over my shoulder. Our prototypes worked, but they were obviously homemade and welded by us, and we aren’t exactly an assembly line. This? This is a beautiful thing, our concept now fully realized.

I throw my arm over her shoulder and pull her close with a smile. “We make one hell of a team, you know.”

She twists in my arms and plants a kiss on me. “Who knows what wonders we can make when we put our minds to it?”

I grin as I lean into her, thankful that I didn’t dress in more than a robe. We just went at it, but Windy? She has ways of revving me up and getting me going.

I’ll meet her every need, every time.

Because I love her more than anything.

EPILOGUE 2

WINDY

TEN YEARS LATER

I stand behind Winter, guiding her hand. “Here, we take out this thing, it’s called a dipstick. It’s how we check how much oil is left in reserve for the car.”

“Uh huh,” my daughter says, precious and trying to understand. She’s eight years old and is such a darling. She wants to learn to do what Mommy and Daddy do. It’s far too dangerous for her to do most of the stuff we do, as an untrained hand would easily be mangled. But this? This is child’s play.

Comparatively, anyway. I wouldn’t leave her to do it on her own.

“See this? How it is mostly clean except for the very bottom? That means it’s almost out of oil.”

“And that’s bad, right?”

“Yes. It needs oil to run well.” Our first little invention prolongs the amount of time a vehicle can go without an oil change, but it still needs to be done sometimes.

We’ve made other little inventions here and there, like a similar application for windshield wiper fluid, some fuel efficiency advancements, but we’ve made enough money to be secure. And the two of us? Our first love was always repairing stuff. Being engineers and inventors is a side thing, something to keep us busy, and we’ve more than succeeded at that.

“So what we do when it’s like this is we refill it. We take this bottle. We take extra care, because if we get it all over us, we’ll smell like oil, and most people don’t like that smell.”

“It smells fine to me, Mommy.”

“That’s because you grew up around it, sweetheart. Most people aren’t us and don’t regularly crack open their cars.”

“They don’t? They must be weird.”

I shake my head, and guide her hand to refilling the oil. “We do this, then we put the stick back in, and make sure the cap is on tight.”

“Uh huh.”

“Then we close everything back up, and we’re all done.”

“That simple, huh?”

“That simple.” I help her down off the little stool I brought out for her. “Now you know how to do something that a whole lot of adults don’t know how to do themselves.”

“Is it all that easy?”

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