It’s late afternoon when the UPS truck eases down the driveway. Amadeo meets the guy outside and circles to the back with him.
“It’s going to be a big box,” Amadeo says helpfully as the UPS man—Darnell, according to the name tag—raises the back with a clatter and starts inspecting boxes. “It’s my new career.”
Darnell shrugs, probably pissed about having to drive his giant truck all this way on the broken-up old roads.
“My business is called Creative Windshield Solutions. Windshield repair. If you ever need any work done, let me know.”
The UPS man nods agreeably but doesn’t smile. “Got it.” He hands down an unwieldy and suspiciously light carton.
“Hold on, hold on. Let me get you my card.”
Amadeo leaves the carton on the step. By the time he returns with the brand-new box of a thousand business cards, Darnell is backing down the driveway.
“Here! Wait!” cries Amadeo, and runs after him waving his card, but Darnell merely glances at him, shifts into drive and takes off, sending gravel shooting behind him.
Inside, Amadeo drags the box across the living room carpet and slits it open to reveal a large gray plastic toolbox.
As he snaps open the flimsy latches, he’s filled with excitement. The toolbox is divided into compartments, and there’s a sheet of labels to stick on each compartment according to a diagram. Everything is individually wrapped in plastic: the awl, the little bottles of resin, suction cups, and sheets of plastic film. A palm-sized battery-operated drill, a clear box full of razor blades. Amadeo bought the add-on, too, the long-crack repair kit in what looks like a pencil case, for three hundred bucks more.
Amadeo reruns the calculations, and it comes out the same: fifty dollars a pop for four hundred repairs, and he’ll clear twenty thousand. And now that he owns the kit and the tools, he need only buy new supplies and resin. In a year, Amadeo figures, he can repair twice or even three times that number. Once he’s taken care of all the windshields locally and in and around Espa?ola, he can work his way south. Just think of all the cracked windshields in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, in all of New Mexico.
Sixty thousand a year isn’t bad, not at all. He can help out with the baby, start a college fund for him, and one for Angel, too, and still have enough left over for a new truck. Also he wants a Suzuki four-wheeler, but he’d be fine with a used one. Maybe he’ll charge a hundred bucks a repair and clear a hundred and twenty thousand. People will definitely pay a hundred bucks for his services—people drop a hundred bucks on lots of things on a daily basis: traffic tickets, groceries.
His prospects look excellent. For the first time in a long while, since Good Friday, in fact, Amadeo is happy—happier even than on Good Friday, because then he was worried about his performance. Now, though, he is filled only with certainty. There was a time when he would have been afraid, embarking on a new business venture like this. But that was before Amadeo asked for the nails, before he flushed his painkillers and gave up booze; anyone with that kind of courage is a man who can succeed.
It feels good to be an entrepreneur, to be a mover in the world, to be a man who plans and creates and gets things done. For so long he’s resented people in power, but now he’s seeing the world through new eyes, and everywhere he looks is opportunity.
Amadeo crawls through the plastic wrappings to the television and loads the instructional DVD. The video opens with five minutes of footage of happy people driving and their windshields being pelted. “You’re minding your own business,” the voice-over says, “when trouble is thrown up in your path, and before you know it, you have a crack.”
“Dang!” says the mustachioed businessman behind the wheel. He swerves dangerously and claps a despairing hand over his head.
In the next scene, the businessman has pulled onto the side of the road. He bends over the shoulder of a happy and helpful windshield repairman. The repairman grins into the camera. “Bingo!” Behind him, a flawless windshield glints.