"Until she had gotten too old to drive, Grandmother had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from Whitman's Patterson Lincoln Mercury, before his untimely death. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit, someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber colored 10W40. It eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living male lineage of the Patterson family — four generations of them — into his hospital room and wrought some kind of unspecified pact with them… So ever since, guerilla mechanic teams had been swiping her Lincoln from the church parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter of a century without maintenance — without even putting gasoline in the tank — had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of male pursuits."
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Chapter 72, "Seattle"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
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Cryptonomicon
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