Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jack
Mrs. Alvarez called at eleven-thirty to say Lily had a temperature and someone needed to come get her.
I was under a Jeep Cherokee when the phone buzzed.
I told Bellows, who told me to go, and I went.
Forty minutes later I was back at the garage with Lily in tow.
The pediatrician had written it off as a twenty-four-hour bug—nothing to worry about, just rest and fluids—but I couldn’t leave her home alone and I couldn’t take the afternoon off.
We had three cars backed up and Bellows was already covering more ground than his back liked.
"She can sit in the office," Bellows said, looking at Lily the way he looked at most things—steadily, without expression, waiting to see what they'd do.
Lily surveyed the office. It was a cramped space off the main bay with a desk buried in invoices and a window that looked out onto the forecourt. She looked at Bellows. Then she marched in, sat down, and unzipped her backpack.
Bellows watched her pull out a homework folder. Then he looked at me.
"She's quiet," he said, as if he’d been bracing for a siren.
"She's sizing you up," I said.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh and went back to work.
She lasted twenty minutes before she appeared at the threshold of the bay, her small shadow stretching across the oil-stained concrete.
"I finished my homework," she said.
I looked at her from under the hood of a Silverado. "All of it?"
"All of it."
"Then read your book."
"I finished that, too."
I looked over at Bellows. He was at his bench, hunched over a brake caliper, not looking at either of us.
"There's a deck of cards in the top drawer," he said, his voice gravelly. "Left side."
Lily disappeared. I heard the metal scrape of the drawer opening, followed by a concentrated silence. With Lily, silence usually meant she’d found a puzzle worth solving. I turned back to the Silverado.
The afternoon moved. Lily came out once to ask Bellows what solitaire was. He explained the rules in four clipped sentences without looking up from his work, and she went back in.
An hour later, she reappeared. She stood at the edge of the bay, watching me with the focused attention she usually reserved for things she was about to take apart.
"What's wrong with it?" she asked.
"Fuel injectors," I said. "Blocked."
"How do they get blocked?"
"Dirty fuel. It builds up over time until the system can't breathe."
She considered this, her head tilted to the side. "Like how your arteries can get blocked?"
I looked at her, wiped a streak of grease across my forehead, and paused. "Yeah. Exactly like that."
She nodded, satisfied with the logic of it, and retreated to the office.
Bellows appeared at my shoulder a moment later. "Smart kid," he said.
"Don't tell her that. Her head's already a problem."
He made that half-laugh sound again and headed back to his bench.
At four-thirty, Lily emerged from the office and announced she was hungry. I looked at the Silverado—which was still a mess of wires and parts—and then at Bellows. He was already putting his tools away with the slow movements of a man whose back had officially clocked out for the day.
"Go on," he said. "Finish it in the morning."
I started cleaning up, wiping down my station. Lily stood in the center of the bay, watching Bellows lock his heavy metal toolbox. I could see her doing the calculation—the same predatory look she’d had at the supermarket right before she cornered Maddie in the parking lot.
"Do you want to come for dinner?" she asked.
Bellows stopped, his hand still on the lid of the box. He looked at her.
"Uncle Jack always makes too much," she said, doubling down. "We always have leftovers we don't know what to do with."
Bellows looked at me. I gave him nothing. I’d already learned that when Lily set her sights on something, the best move was to stay out of the blast zone.
He looked back at her for a long moment. "What's he making?"
"I don't know yet," Lily said. "But it'll definitely be too much."
A brief and unguarded flicker passed through Bellows’ face, before it settled back into its usual arrangement.
"All right," he said. "One condition."
Lily stood her ground, waiting.
"You tell me how the solitaire went."
She looked at him with total gravity. "I lost every time."
"That's solitaire," he said.
* * *
I made chili. There was, as Lily had predicted, too much of it.
Bellows ate like a man who'd spent forty years eating alone and had no strong feelings about conversation at meals. It suited Lily fine. She talked, he listened, and his occasional single-sentence responses seemed to satisfy her completely.
At some point she put her fork down and looked at the empty chair across from her—the one that had been Maddie's, three weeks ago, the one that had been empty since.
"You came for dinner," Lily said to Bellows, with the air of someone establishing a precedent. "Maddie came for dinner too. She's a doctor." She paused. "She hasn't come back, though." She turned that level, five-year-old gaze on me. "How come she hasn't come back?"
"Is that right," Bellows said. Not a question.
"Uncle Jack hasn't called her," Lily said. "Even though she came all the way over when I was sick."
The table was quiet.
"Lily," I said.
"I'm just saying." She picked her fork back up and stabbed a kidney bean. "Gerald thinks it's been long enough."
Bellows looked at me. I looked at my bowl.
After dinner, Lily went upstairs for her bath. I handled the dishes while Bellows sat at the table with his coffee—black, no sugar, accepted without a word. The house settled into the evening quiet, broken only by the muffled rush of water pipes and the occasional car hum from the street outside.
"How long have you been back?" Bellows asked.
"Two months, give or take."
He nodded, slowly rotating the mug between his calloused hands. "Town treating you alright?"
"Fine," I said. "People have been decent."
He nodded again. It was a rhythmic, patient movement. I’d learned at the garage that when Bellows nodded like that, he was building toward something—lining up his thoughts like parts on a bench.
"The doctor," he said.
I didn't look up from the sink. I just kept scrubbing. "Old history."
"Mm." He drank his coffee. "Kid seems to think it's current."
"The kid is five."
"Five-year-olds aren't usually wrong about these things," he said. Like this was just a known fact, something he'd observed over a long life. "They don't have the same investment in being wrong that we do."
I dried my hands. Turned around and leaned against the counter.
Bellows looked at me steadily over his mug. Not pushing. Just—there, the way he was always just there, taking up exactly the space he needed and waiting for things to come to him.
"It's complicated," I said.
"Usually is," he said.
"There's history."
"There's always history." He set the mug down with a definitive click.
"Question is whether it's the kind you're carrying, or the kind that's carrying you.
" He said it the way he said everything: flat and without drama, like a practical observation about load-bearing. "Only you know which one it is."
Upstairs the water stopped. The small sounds of Lily getting herself ready for bed: the bathroom door, the creak of her room.
Bellows stood, with the careful movement of a man getting his back's permission first. "Good chili," he said.
"Thanks."
He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. "Same time tomorrow," he said. And then he was gone, and I heard his truck start on the street outside and pull away, and I stood in the kitchen in the quiet and thought about what he'd said.
The kind you're carrying or the kind that's carrying you.
I looked at the empty chair across the table.
Then I went upstairs to say goodnight to Lily.