Chapter 3
SPARK
Junie sets a bowl down hard enough to rattle the table. “Eat first. Talk after.”
Grits, eggs over easy, bacon fried past crisp into something better, biscuits still steaming when she splits them.
It’s more food than I’ve seen in one place since the church potluck after the funeral, back when half of Tarver brought casseroles because nobody knew what else to bring someone who’d just buried the only family she had left.
“I can’t eat all this.”
“Didn’t ask what you could do. Asked you to eat it.” Junie pours herself coffee and sits across from me like that settles it, which it does.
Songbird comes through the back door in jeans and a flannel and drops into the chair beside me without asking.
“Heard you put Boulder on his heels last night.” She says it like a compliment. “From what I hear, half this club’s been trying that for years.”
“I didn’t do anything. I just said Wade’s name.”
“Wade.” Songbird sets her mug down slow. “Didn’t know he had a brother. Boulder’s never talked about him in front of me. Though, I haven’t been around long, so that’s not saying a whole lot.”
Junie asks easy questions, the kind that don’t need armor.
How’d I sleep. Is there anybody else back where I came from, who needs looking after, stock, a neighbor, anybody at all.
I tell her it’s just a farm now, mine to worry about since my stepfather died three weeks back, and her face flickers, quick, gone before I can name it.
“Was he sick long?” she asks, careful with it.
I tell her the truth, that his heart had been bad for a while and he wouldn’t see anybody about it, that I used to catch him rubbing his left arm and calling it nothing. She goes quiet like it reminds her she’s buried people of her own.
“He scares you last night?” Songbird asks, not unkind, tipping her chin toward the door like Boulder might walk through it.
I turn my mug in a slow circle before I answer. “Some. I don’t know how to explain it. He went so still when I said Wade’s name, and then he looked at me like—” I stop, because I don’t have the rest of that sentence yet.
Ihear the bike as soon as I step out of the kitchen for fresh air. Three cranks, three coughs, then nothing, out past the kitchen window toward a low shop building with its bay doors rolled up. I’m halfway to the noise before I’ve decided to go.
A kid crouches over a stripped-down bike.
Boulder stands a few feet off with his arms crossed, watching him strip a carburetor down that isn’t the problem.
From the far bay, a man’s voice carries over the clatter, telling a story that’s mostly its own laugh, dirty even from here.
Nobody’s laughing along. Nobody notices me until I’m already crouched at the front wheel, ear turned toward the tank while the kid cranks it again.
“No spark,” I say. “Pull the plug.”
He pulls it. Black and wet, fouled clean through.
“Or your coil’s dead,” I add, “but check the plug first, it’s cheaper.”
Nobody moves for a second. Then the kid grins and swaps the plug without another word, and somebody laughs off to the side, short and delighted.
Boulder hasn’t said anything. He hasn’t moved either, arms still crossed, missing nothing. But when the bike turns over clean on the next try, he says one word, quiet, mostly to himself.
“Spark.”
“That’s her name now, right,” the kid says, grinning wider. “Girl walks in off the road and fixes my bike faster than I can.”
Boulder nods like it’s a done deal.
A man comes around the corner of the shop, big through the gut and the shoulders both, the storyteller from the far bay. A patch that says his name is Brick. He looks me over slow, head to boots and back.
“Girl’s got a gift, huh.” His grin is all wrong. “Bet those hands are good for more than engines.”
I don’t bother straightening up from the bike. “They’re good at sorting out which parts are junk.”
The kid ducks behind the bike to hide his grin. Boulder’s already closer than he was, three steps and he doesn’t shout. His voice drops until there’s no volume in it at all, which is worse.
“Say it again.”
“Just talking, Boulder, didn’t mean nothing by it.” Brick’s grin is already gone.
“You mouth off about her one more time,” Boulder says, hand closing slow and deliberate over the front of Brick’s cut, “and I’ll take you off this crew myself.”
He holds there a beat, close enough that Brick has to look away first, then lets go and steps back like nothing happened.
Brick mutters something that might be sorry and finds somewhere else to be.
Another guy I didn’t even see arrive whistles low through his teeth. I take it to mean he’s glad it isn’t him. The kid goes very interested in the bike.
Somebody near the back mutters, “Ain’t seen him do that since—” and gets an elbow in the ribs before he finishes it. And then the man clams up and won’t meet my eyes.
I want the rest of that sentence so bad my teeth ache with it.
Nobody’s giving it to me. Boulder’s already turned away, wiping his hand on his jeans like he touched something he’d rather not have, and I’m left standing in a garage, with a new name nobody asked if I wanted, wondering what else this club knows about him that I don’t.