“Fair enough.” She took a step closer. “I want to help you. There are a lot of people in this town who care about you. Love you. You’re right, maybe they pigeonholed you and see what they want to see. But that doesn’t mean that when they’re confronted with the truth that they won’t do whatever they can to help.”
He didn’t respond to her statement, just trailed his hand along the edge of the car. “I didn’t always want to be a mechanic. When I was growing up, I wanted to go into the military like Finn and Zac. Those guys were my heroes. But when I went to enlist, they turned me down because of my dyslexia.”
He kept his words matter of fact, but damned if that didn’t still hurt.
“Outright? You have such strengths. They couldn’t see that?”
He shrugged. “I knew my dyslexia was a liability going in, but I thought I would be able to bluff until I proved my worth, you know?”
“Like you did in high school. People already knew you, liked you, so they didn’t look too closely at your academics.”
“Pretty much. I had the paperwork filled out when I came in so it wouldn’t be an issue.”
God, he’d walked into that recruiting office so cocky and sure. Full of the knowledge that he’d be a damned good soldier.
Maybe he wasn’t into reading, but he could do the stuff that mattered. He was strong, smart, could follow orders. Most of all, he’d wanted to serve his country.
“Then they gave me a written aptitude test. It hadn’t been part of the initial recruitment process when Finn had joined, so I wasn’t expecting it.”
“You couldn’t take it?”
He’d tried. To this day, he remembered sitting at that desk, staring at those words, promising God just about anything if words could somehow make sense this one time. But in the end, Baby had been forced to return the test to the officer incomplete and let him know about his dyslexia.
The man had been sympathetic, a mix of pity and acceptance in his eyes.
God, Baby would never forget that look. The you’re obviously a good guy, sorry you’re fundamentally broken like this look.
“No, I couldn’t complete it. The recruitment officer said he would make sure that my other strengths were noted in my file, but that was all he could do. I got the rejection letter a week later.”
That had damned near broken him. Eighteen years old and the life he’d planned out for himself had been ripped out from under him.
She flinched but took a step closer. “That was their loss. Because you’ve obviously figured out ways to learn that don’t involve reading.”
He shrugged. He’d never told anyone about the military rejecting him. Pop Owens had probably figured it out given how Baby had always told him working at the garage was only short-term until he joined up. Then one day, that option had disappeared, and Baby stopped talking about it completely. Pop had never brought it up.
“A lot of information I can get on audiobooks. But not everything.”
Understanding dawned in her eyes. “That’s how you’d made it so far through college.”
“Mostly. But it doesn’t work for everything. Like the literature, English, and composition classes I’ve been trying to pass for eighteen months and haven’t been successful.”
“I still don’t understand why you want to take them at all.”
He swept his arm out around him. “For this place. Albert Owens, who owned it, we called him Pop, left it to me in his will with the caveat that I complete a bachelor’s degree in seven years. My seven years is up this May.”
“What? Why? Did he know about...”
“I’m not sure. He was a pretty insightful old coot. So honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.”
“He believed in you.”
“Believing in me or not doesn’t really matter. Unless I’m willing to cheat, there’s no way I’m going to pass these three classes by May. And if I’m not done by May, the garage goes up for sale, and there’s a national conglomerate ready to buy it first thing.”
She walked closer. “Then it’s time for you to get help. Finishing these classes is completely doable if you have the right support network.”
“It’s not that easy. It’ll change everything. Everyone around here has always known that school wasn’t my jam, but they never really looked closer than that. I don’t want to see the pity in everyone’s eyes.”