Chapter 7
Alma
Diego's case collapsed on a Thursday.
I was at the shop when Knox called. I had just finished installing a new battery on a customer's Sportster, and I was standing at the front counter with the customer's check in one hand and a grease rag in the other, and the phone in the office rang, and I answered it on the third ring because I was wiping my hands first.
I said, "Navarro Custom Cycles."
Knox said, "Alma. It's Knox."
I said, "Hi, Knox."
He said, "Sit down."
I said, "Why."
He said, "Because I want you to sit down. I'll wait."
I sat down. The office chair was the one Tomás had used. It creaked. I had not, in three months, replaced it, because the creak felt — I don't know what it felt. Like the office's pulse. I sat down on it and the creak landed and Knox said, "Are you sitting."
I said, "I'm sitting."
He said, "The judge ruled this morning. Diego's challenge is dismissed with prejudice.
The marriage clause is satisfied. The shop is fully and permanently yours.
There is no further legal action available to him, and frankly, no further legal action I would expect from him. It's over, Alma. You won."
I did not say anything.
He said, "Alma."
I said, "I'm here."
He said, "Are you crying."
I said, "I am about to."
He said, "Cry. Go ahead. Take a minute. Call me back in an hour and we'll talk about paperwork."
He hung up.
I sat in Tomás's office chair and I held the phone in my hand for a long minute.
I looked at the wall above the desk, where Tomás had hung a calendar from a tire company twelve years ago and never taken it down because the calendar had a photograph of a 1956 Vincent Black Shadow on it that he had loved.
I looked at the file cabinet, which I had reorganized, but which still had the third drawer locked, because the key had never been found, and I had not yet had the heart to drill it.
I looked at the shop's permits, framed on the wall, with Tomás's name on them in the small careful script of a man who had been proud of his name. I looked at all of it.
Then I put the phone down.
Then I went into the shop floor — left the customer's bike, left the check, left the rag — and I walked through the bay and out the back door and across the gravel and into the small space behind the dumpster where nobody could see me, and I leaned against the brick wall, and I cried.
I cried hard. I cried the way I had not let myself cry at Tomás's funeral.
I cried for the shop, and for my uncle, and for the version of myself that had walked into this place three months ago with a clipboard and a plan and the absolute certainty that I could spreadsheet my way through grief.
I cried because she had been wrong about that, and she had been right about it too, and both were true at once, the way both columns of a balanced ledger are true at once.
I cried because Tomás had built a thing with his hands and his time and his patience, and I had inherited it, and I had spent three months learning what it cost to keep a thing like that alive, and the cost was worth it, and also the cost was high, and I had not, until this exact morning, known that I had been carrying the cost the whole time.
I cried until my shoulders shook.
Beckett found me there.
I did not know how he had known. I would learn later that Knox had called him after he had hung up with me, because Knox was a man who understood how legal news lands on a person, and he had told Beckett, your wife is about to either celebrate or come undone, and I am not sure which, but you should be there.
Beckett had been at the forge, fifteen minutes away.
He had driven over. He had parked in the front lot, walked through the shop, found the unattended bike, found the abandoned rag, found the office empty, and walked to the back door because — he told me later — because I knew where you'd go.
He came around the dumpster.
He did not say anything.
He crossed the small gravel space between us.
He did not ask why I was crying. He did not ask if I was okay.
He did not ask whether the call had been good or bad.
He just walked over and put his arms around me, the way he had done on the night I'd told him about Diego, the way he had done a hundred times in the previous month, the way a man does when his wife is crying and the crying is the only thing that needs attending to.
I cried into his shirt.
His shirt was the dark-blue one he wore on Thursdays, the one that smelled like soap and forge smoke in equal measure, and I cried into it for I do not know how long.
He did not move. He did not speak. He held me with the absolute steady patience of a man who had once spent three weeks shaping a fender from a sheet of mild steel, and he was, at that moment, applying the same patience to me.
When I stopped, I said, "We won."
He said, "I figured."
I said, "Knox called."
He said, "I know."
I said, "The shop is mine."
He said, "It always was."
I lifted my head from his shirt. There was a damp patch on it where I had cried. I felt bad about the damp patch. He saw me looking at the damp patch and he said, "Don't even start. It's a shirt."
I almost laughed. I did not have a laugh ready, so the almost-laugh came out as a small wet hiccup.
I said, "Beckett."
He said, "Yes."
I said, "The marriage clause is satisfied. The court has ruled. We don't legally — I want to be specific — we don't legally need to be married anymore."
He said, "Alma."
I said, "I know. We had this conversation. In bed. Three weeks ago. The terms were renegotiated. I am bringing it up because the moment is here. The moment we discussed. The moment when the legal need ends and the personal need is the only thing remaining."
He said, "Yes."
I said, "I want to be very clear about the personal need."
He said, "Okay."
I said, "I need to update the paperwork."
He said, "What paperwork."
I said, "All of it. The contract. The terms. The internal contract.
Not the marriage license — that one is fine, that one I want to keep.
The contract you and I signed in my office on the day we shook hands.
That one needs revision. From temporary to permanent.
There are tax implications. Health insurance implications.
Beneficiary implications. There is a — Beckett, are you laughing at me. "
He was. He was laughing. He was laughing the low, quiet, helpless laugh of a man who could not believe what he was hearing and who also was not surprised by it.
He said, "You are the only woman in the world who would turn a love declaration into a tax conversation."
I said, "You married an accountant."
He said, "I did. And I'd do it again."
I said, "Beckett."
He said, "Without the will. Without the deadline. Without any reason at all except that you talk to engines in Spanish and you make the best enchiladas in the state of Virginia and you cry when you win because you actually understand what winning costs."
He was still holding me. We were still standing behind the dumpster.
I said, "I love you."
He said, "I know."
I said, "When did you know."
He said, "Week six. You fell asleep on the couch and I covered you with the blanket and went to my room and said it out loud to my ceiling. I'm in love with my wife. I said it like that. I waited for it to feel less true. It didn't."
I said, "Why didn't you tell me."
He said, "Because the metal wasn't ready."
I said, "What."
He said, "It's a forge thing."
I said, "Beckett. When did you think the metal was ready."
He said, "When you reorganized my forge without asking and it actually worked better. That's when I knew you'd come to it. I just didn't know when."
I said, "You knew before I did."
He said, "I had a structural advantage. I am, technically, in love with metaphors for my own profession."
I almost laughed again. The almost-laugh, this time, made it.
It was a small, watery, surprised laugh, and it came out of me unbidden, and Beckett's mouth twitched in response, and we stood behind the dumpster in the cold gravel and laughed quietly, both of us, the way you laugh when something heavy has just been set down and the room afterward seems to have more air.
He kissed me.
It was a Beckett kiss — slow, considered, complete.
He had been kissing me, in the four weeks since the morning of the fender, with a particular careful attention that I had been learning to receive.
I closed my eyes. The cold gravel under my work boots faded.
The dumpster faded. The shop faded. There was, for a long moment, only the steady warm pressure of his mouth and the absolute certainty that nothing about this required any further negotiation.
When we broke apart, he said, "Come inside. I'll close the shop. You're done for the day."
I said, "I have a customer at three."
He said, "Reschedule."
I said, "I am not rescheduling. I won. I am celebrating by working."
He said, "That's not a celebration. That's a Tuesday."
I said, "It is a celebration if you do it with intention."
He said, "Alma."
I said, "I'm going back to work. Come back at six.
We will go to the diner. We will tell Sienna.
Sienna will explode. We will tell Diesel.
Diesel will be quiet about it for approximately three minutes and then he will hug me.
We will come back and we will sit on the couch and you will read poetry to me and I will not interrupt for at least twenty minutes, and that is my celebration. "
He looked at me. He looked at me the way he had looked at me on the morning of the fender — patient, considering, like a man assessing whether the metal was ready to be moved.
He said, "You are taking five minutes."
I said, "What."
He said, "You are coming inside. You are washing your face. You are sitting down for five minutes with a glass of water. Then you can finish the bike. I'll close down at five-thirty. Six o'clock at the diner. Then home."
I said, "Beckett, I can — "