I slowly walked back into my parent’s living room on Father’s Day afternoon and hunted for my dad.

“Um, Dad,” I said, quietly, standing behind him. “Could you maybe come outside for a moment and give me some advice?”

I was trying to be discreet. I didn’t want to alarm my wife who was sitting across the room talking to my mother. But I’m not very good at hiding things from my wife, and she immediately looked at me with a concerned eyebrow.

“It’s fine,” I told her, as my dad stood to follow me out the door. “There’s just something about our car that I would like my dad to look at quick.”

This was the truth, but it maybe wasn’t the whole truth. I couldn’t tell her that I had just walked back out to the car to wake up our son and had found brake fluid leaking out of our front wheel and pooling on the ground. I had knelt down near the tire for a long time as I traced the path. And with a turn of my stomach, I realized that it led right up from the ground, up the tire, into the wheel well, and straight to the brakes. It was a fresh leak. It was still wet to the touch. I rubbed the grease between my fingers and smelled it to confirm that it wasn’t just water. Maybe we had hit a puddle somewhere on the way in? But no. This was definitely not water.

I don’t pretend to know a lot about cars. At 40 years old I know enough to do some routine maintenance. And, I’ve been young and poor and I drove a lot of old cars until they died, so I know what to look for, but this wasn’t an old car. This was the newest car we had ever owned. I poked with my toe in the gravel at the base of the tire and tried to estimate how much liquid was there. I became very concerned. How much would something like this cost to repair? Could we even get the car home? How did this even happen? What should I do?

And then I thought of my Dad. I could see him, just inside the screen door, sitting in a chair in his living room. It was convenient that it happened in my dad’s driveway.

I would just walk in and ask him to come and look at it. He would know what to do. So, that’s what I did.

He pulled on some boots and after the door was closed behind us I explained to him what I had seen and all of my worst-case scenarios. He just listened as we crunched around the car and stood side by side looking down at my tire and the puddle of fluid leaking out of it.

I waited.

“Well, James,” My dad said finally. “The dog peed on your car.”

It took me a second to realize what he had said. “What?” But he was right. “Ah! What?!” I looked down at my hand and my dirty fingers. “Oh, man. That’s fantastic. That’s just great. Cool. Cool. I guess that’s the best case, but, ah man!”

We walked back into the house and I rushed to the kitchen to wash my hands several times with soap and hot water. The dog stood on the other side of the kitchen noisily lapping up more water from his dish, and I tried to ignore it.

“So, what was wrong?” Andrea asked from across the living room. “Nothing,” I said, staring out the kitchen window. “Just Father’s Day stuff.”

I realized at this point that I had been so distracted that I hadn’t even woken up my son to bring him inside. So, I stepped back out the door and unbuckled Gideon from his booster seat so I could lift him into the gravel driveway. He rubbed his face and yawned and then his eyes fell on the puddle as we stepped around it.

“Oh no, Dad, what is that?” he pointed.

“Oh, that?” I said. “That’s where the dog peed on our car,” I said this as confidently as possible, passing down the wisdom and knowledge that has been in the Smith family for several generations now. My son just nodded and followed me inside, no doubt convinced that his father knows everything.