Cinder (The Grimm Riders MC #5)

Prologue

Elodie

The last good winter smelled like kerosene and orange peel.

That's the part nobody believes when I tell it.

They expect a garage to smell like one thing, and it does — it smells like solvent and cold iron and the sweet burnt-sugar ghost of old gear oil.

But my father kept a kerosene heater under the bench in January, and he ate an orange every afternoon at three o'clock, and he peeled it in one long spiral he'd drape over the heater grille so the whole shop smelled like a church at Christmas.

"You're wasting it," I told him. I was fifteen. Everything anybody did was wasting something.

"It's a peel, Ellie."

"It's an orange. You could eat the peel."

"You could eat a shoe." He handed me half the orange without looking up. "Doesn't mean you should. Come here. Listen to this."

The bike on the lift was a '78 Shovel that belonged to a man named Dutch who paid in installments and firewood. My father had the plug wires off and a screwdriver pressed to the case, handle end against his ear, like a doctor who'd given up on stethoscopes.

"Sit," he said.

I sat on the creeper trolley. It rolled six inches, the way it always did, and I let it.

"Now hush."

He thumbed the starter. The engine came up rough and settled into something that sounded fine to me, because at fifteen everything sounds fine, and I said so.

"Fine." He said the word the way other men say sin. "Fine is what a thing sounds like when you're not listening. Close your eyes."

"Papi—"

"Close them."

I closed them.

"Now find the beat under the beat."

That's not a real instruction. I want to be clear about that.

Twelve years later I have taught four apprentices and I have never once said find the beat under the beat, because it means nothing, because you cannot hand somebody a decade of your own ears in one sentence, and my father knew that and said it anyway, because he was a romantic and he was dying and neither of us knew the second part yet.

But I found it.

There was the big rhythm, the one anybody hears, potato-potato-potato. And then underneath it, tucked in the gap, a tiny extra tick. Like somebody clearing their throat at the back of a room.

My eyes came open. "There's something in there."

"Where?"

"After the front cylinder. Right after. Little one."

He killed the engine and the silence rushed in and he was smiling at me with his whole ruined face, that man, that smile, I would sell a year of my life to see it again.

"Tell me what it is," he said.

"I don't know what it is."

"Guess. Wrong guesses are free."

"Valve?"

"Not a valve."

"Chain?"

"Colder."

"Papi, I don't—"

"Pushrod," he said. "Bent. Some idiot rode it three hundred miles like that and then told Dutch the noise was character.

" He wiped his hands on the rag he kept in his back pocket, the one my mother had hemmed for him a year before she left, which I've never told anybody, and which I still have.

"You heard it in nine seconds. It took me until I was twenty-six to hear a thing like that. "

"Because nobody taught you."

"Because nobody taught me," he agreed. "That's the whole difference between a man and his kid, Ellie. About eleven years, if he does it right."

I ate the orange. He put the wires back on. Outside, the snow came down over the highway in that flat, patient way it does in Ash Fork, where there's nothing to break the wind for forty miles and the plows come through at four in the morning like a rumor.

He worked in silence for a minute. That was the other thing about him. He could talk your ear off for an hour and then go completely quiet in the middle of a sentence and you learned not to fill it.

"Dutch is going to ask what it cost," he said eventually.

"A pushrod's eleven dollars."

"A pushrod's eleven dollars. What's it cost, Ellie?"

"...Eleven dollars?"

"Wrong." He set the wrench down. "It costs him nothing, because Dutch brought me four cords of oak in November and I've been eating off that stove ever since.

And it costs me forty minutes, and it costs you nine seconds, and if I write eleven dollars on a slip of paper and hand it to him, what have I actually done? "

"Charged him eleven dollars."

"I've told him he was right to come here." He picked the wrench back up. "That's the product. Everybody thinks the product's the part. The part's the cheapest thing in the building."

"That's not how a business works, Papi."

"It's how this business works, and this business has fed us for eleven years, so you'll want to consider that before you get clever.

" He was smiling into the rocker box. "You're going to be better at this than me.

That's fine, that's what it's for. But you'll be worse at the slip of paper for about a decade and then you'll figure it out, and when you figure it out, that's when it's yours. "

"It's already mine. It's on the sign."

"Sign's paint," he said.

He said, without turning around: "This place is yours."

"I know."

"No, you don't, you're fifteen, you think everything's yours.

" He tapped the sign through the window with the wrench.

VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER. He'd had it painted the week I turned eight.

Daughter. Singular. Presumptuous of him — I could have hated engines.

I could have been a dentist. "But it's on the sign, so. "

"So."

"So don't let anybody talk you out of the noise you hear," he said. "People will try. They'll say it's fine. Fine is a scam, mija."

Six months later he was in a bed at Mercy General with a body that had turned on him in some fast, stupid, cellular way, and I was sixteen, and there was paperwork.

I want to be fair about this, because being unfair about it would be easier and I've watched what easy does to people.

Camille wasn't a villain. Camille was a woman he married when I was eleven, who taught me to drive a stick in the church lot and once punched a customer for calling me sweetheart in a way she didn't like.

Camille loved him. I have to keep that fact somewhere I can reach it, or the whole story turns into something small.

I've thought about what she was doing in that room, and the honest answer is: her job.

Somebody had to do the folder. Somebody has to sit with a lanyard and initial the beds, and it is never the person who gets remembered kindly.

She was thirty-nine years old and her husband was dying at a rate of about a week per week, and she had a sixteen-year-old in a chair by the window who could not be spoken to about any of it, and she had a stack of pages, and she was not a lawyer, and neither was he, and nobody in that building was being paid to notice what page eleven did.

If she'd had six months and a decent attorney, none of this happens. That's the whole thing. Everything that has happened to me since is downstream of the fact that nobody in my family could afford four hundred dollars an hour in 2011.

What Camille was, was tired, and frightened, and married to a man who could not read a page of small type without falling asleep by paragraph two, which had been a joke in our house for five years. Your father signs anything. Don't ever hand him a pen in a bar.

So there was a folder. And there was a woman from the hospital's financial services office with a lanyard and a very gentle voice.

And there was a stack that needed initialing in eleven places, and my father was on a morphine drip and his hands shook, and he looked up at Camille and said, "Is this the one about the beds? "

"Some of it's about the beds," she said.

"Then give it here."

I was in the chair by the window. I was sixteen. I was reading a magazine about bikes I would never own and I heard the pen move and I did not get up.

That's the sentence. That's the one I've carried for eleven years like a rock in my boot. I did not get up.

He signed the sheaf. He got to the last page and he was so tired, and he looked at me instead of the paper, and he said, "Ellie. Do you have the tools at home or here?"

"Home. I brought the metric set inside because it was going to freeze."

"Good girl." Sign. "Good girl. Metric freezes first."

That is not true. Metric does not freeze first. Metric doesn't freeze at all, it's steel, it doesn't care what language it was measured in, and it was the last thing he ever taught me and it was completely wrong, and I have never in my life loved anything as much as I love that sentence.

Camille walked the woman with the lanyard out into the corridor. I heard about nine words of it through the door. Sorry was in there twice, and so was tomorrow, which was optimistic of everyone.

My father turned his head on the pillow and found me.

"You're still reading that magazine."

"I'm looking at a bike."

"Which one?"

"The yellow one. The one they only made for four years."

"They stopped making it because it was too good," he said. "That's always why."

"That's not a real rule."

"Everything I've ever told you is a real rule," said my father, "and about a third of them are wrong, and you're going to spend your whole life sorting out which third, and that's the job, mija.

That's what a father is. That's what any of them are.

" He closed his eyes. "Come sit where I can see you without turning. "

I moved the chair. I did that much. I moved the chair four feet and sat in it and held his hand and did not, at any point in the next ninety minutes, look at the stack of paper on the rolling table, which had a pen lying across it at a diagonal like something dropped.

He died on a Tuesday. It snowed. The plows came through at four.

Here is what I learned at nineteen, in a lawyer's office with a water cooler that gurgled every ninety seconds like it was laughing at us.

Camille remarried. Two years after. A man named Gerald Thorne, who sold agricultural insurance and had two daughters and a way of listening to you with his head tilted that made you feel briefly, gorgeously important.