First Fiction Fridays: Oil Change at Rath’s Garage

Today’s hook-up culture draws a heavy line between love and sex, trust and power. Can that line shift? And if it does—or doesn’t—how does that influence other aspects of life? Oil Change at Rath’s Garage explores that culture and examines what happens when love tries to fight its way in. And when honest love wins out. Jack Humphreys has spent a decade dragging his two motherless sons around rural Alberta. For now, their never-ending road trip finds them calling the northern town of Delwood home. They move in down the street from the town born-and- bred Rutger family, and soon their lives intertwine in ways that will have lasting repercussions. Jack and older son Matt slide into life as they know it: Jack uses sex as a shield and Matt uses sex as an escape. It is the only way 11-year-old Ben has ever seen his father and his brother with women.

Then Matt does the unthinkable: he falls in love. But that kind of love doesn’t work in the Humphreys family. Jack knows that well, bitter and still broken from his long ago loss. And Ben is not able to accept that Matt can “do” love. For Matt, it is a struggle to show love to a girl who is more than a one night stand. He only understands the love he and his brother share and on good days, the love their father shows them. Need bleeds into desperation and in the end, it’s desperation that grips the Humphreys men and the Rutger family, pushing them to make the hard decisions.