My wife sat me down one afternoon and said it plain. You don't have any hobbies. You don't cook. You don't see anybody locally. You don't do anything. Get a hobby.

I told her I was a workaholic. That was the hobby. I'd been wrenching on cars my whole life out of necessity, and somewhere in the last ten years the necessity left. I had no reason to fix anything anymore. I liked it that way.

She suggested we get a cheap car, something I could play with. I said no. I wasn't interested. I didn't want to start.

Two weeks later there was a Mustang on the driveway.

A 2007 GT. V8. Rear-ended hard. She bought it. She didn't ask.

I asked her what this was doing here. She said you've got something to play with now. I told her I wasn't going to touch it. I wasn't going to play. I meant it.

Three weeks it sat there. Every day I walked past it. Every day I told myself I was going to call somebody to haul it away. I never called.

One Saturday I was making coffee and looking out the window and the Mustang was looking back. I told myself I'd just check what the damage actually was. Just look. Pulled the bumper off. The hit was uglier than it looked under the cover, but the structure was alive. Pullable, maybe. I went to Harbor Freight and dropped two hundred bucks on a basic pulling kit, told myself I was just going to try.

Tried. Useless. The metal wouldn't come back enough.

So I grabbed the grinder. Cut out the bad section. Drove to the junkyard prepared to give up on the whole thing if the donor metal was expensive. The piece I needed was forty bucks.

Forty bucks. I stood there with it in my hands and thought about how cheap that was for a story that might keep going.

Stopped at Home Depot on the way home and rented a welder for sixty bucks a day. I had never welded in my life. Drove home, watched two YouTube videos, started laying beads. It worked. Ugly but it worked. Cleaned it up. Spray bombed it black to seal the welds.

The bumper was back on by Sunday night. The car looked at me different.

So did my wife. She didn't say I told you so. She didn't have to.