Prologue #2
Camille got sick. Camille died. Fourteen months, start to finish, and I held her hand at the end of it and she said I'm sorry twice and I thought she meant about dying.
And in that folder from Mercy General, in among the beds and the consents and the forms about who could make decisions, my father had signed a transfer of business interest into joint marital property, in the state of Arizona, on a morphine drip, at nine forty at night, with a pen he could barely hold and a daughter twelve feet away reading a magazine.
Joint marital property passes to the surviving spouse.
The surviving spouse remarried, and died, and did not leave a will, because she was forty-six and people who are forty-six do not believe in wills.
And a man who has never held a wrench in his life woke up one morning owning a building with my father's name on the sign, and my name on the sign under it, and me inside it.
The lawyer, who was kind, and who charged me nothing, said: "I'm not going to lie to you. It's clean."
"It's not clean. He was dying."
"He was dying and competent. Those aren't opposites." The water cooler gurgled. "There's no fraud here, Ms. Vasquez. There's not even really a mistake. It's just — arithmetic."
"Arithmetic."
"A series of legal events that each make sense and add up to something obscene." He capped his pen. "Which is most of my job, if I'm honest."
I went back to the garage that night, because it was February and the loft above the parts room was the only place I had a mattress, and because the tools were there, and because a person can put up with almost anything if the alternative is never touching her father's tools again.
Thorne was in the office with the space heater on, doing something with a calculator.
He looked up. Head tilted. That listening face.
"You went and saw somebody," he said. Not angry. Never angry. "That's smart, Elodie. I'd have done the same. Did they explain it?"
"They explained it."
"Good." He wrote a number down. "Then we can stop dancing. You want to stay, you stay. There's room and board, and there's what I've put into your training over the years, and we'll call it a debt and you'll work it off, and one day it'll be square and we'll shake hands like adults."
"He taught me. Not you."
"Somebody paid the light bill while he taught you," Thorne said, and smiled, and turned the calculator around so I could see the total, and it was the first time I ever saw a number used as a hand around a throat.
I looked past him, out the window, at the sign.
VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER.
The paint was going. The D was flaking off first, which felt personal.
"How long," I said.
"How long what?"
"How long does it take. To work off. Give me a year."
And he did the most Gerald Thorne thing that has ever been done in the history of that building, which is that he thought about it seriously.
He looked at the ceiling. He tapped the calculator with the pen.
He gave every appearance of a man performing a genuine calculation on behalf of somebody he'd like to help.
"Six years," he said. "Call it six. Maybe five if we have a good summer."
"Five years."
"It's not a punishment, Elodie. It's what things cost." He set the pen down. "You want it faster, you can take on more work. That's entirely up to you. Nobody's going to stop you."
Which was true. Nobody ever did stop me.
I took on more work for nine years — nights, weekends, every fleet contract and seized motor and hopeless case within forty miles — and every January the room-and-board reset and the number went up, and every January he'd show me and say, well, that's a shame, and mean it, in the way a man means it about weather.
Five years. I want to be clear that he said five years, and that at the time I believed him, and that I believed him because he believed himself, because a man who has decided the arithmetic is just arithmetic never has to lie about anything.
"Okay," I said.
"Good girl."
He didn't know. That's the thing. He couldn't have known that was my father's, that those exact two words belonged to a dying man and a bottle of morphine and metric freezing first. He picked them out of the air the way anyone would.
"I'll stay," I said.
"I know," he said, gently, the gentlest man in Arizona. "Get some sleep. Marisol used the last of the hot water, so."
I went up the ladder and lay in the dark and did not cry, and that was the last night for a very long time that I gave myself the option.
I lay awake that night doing what nineteen-year-olds do, which is drafting speeches.
I had eleven of them. I had one where I was calm and devastating. I had one where I quoted the lawyer. I had one where I went to the newspaper, which is hilarious, because the Ash Fork paper is a woman named Dee who does it out of a spare room and mostly covers the school.
And underneath all eleven of them was the thing I could not draft around, which was that every single version ended with me walking out the door.
That's the trap. It isn't a lock. Nobody ever locked anything.
Thorne left the keys on the hook by the office door for nine years and I could have taken them any night of my life, and that's precisely why it worked, because a locked door is something you fight and an open one is something you choose, and after enough years of choosing it you stop being able to tell the difference between a cage and a decision.
Eight years.
That's the part I don't tell. Eight years of a number that grew a little faster every winter than a body can work, of a wood stove and a parts loft and a pair of stepsisters who were handed a language for me before they ever met me.
Eight years of being the best engine mechanic in the state of Arizona and being paid in soup.
People ask why I didn't leave. They ask it kindly. It's still the stupidest question in the world.
Because he's in there. Because the rag is in the drawer and the peel-burn is still on the heater grille and the creeper still rolls six inches when you sit on it, and because somewhere in that building there is a fifteen-year-old girl with her eyes shut, finding the beat under the beat, and if I walk out the door with my toolbox I have to leave her in there alone.
So no. I stayed.
And then in the ninth spring, four Harleys came off the highway into my lot with nine days of work on them and no money at all, and one of them had a fuel problem I could hear from sixty feet away.
I want it on the record that I heard him before I saw him.
That's not romantic. That's just what I do.
But I'll give you this much: the sign still said DAUGHTER that morning, and the D was still going, and I had been putting off climbing up there with a brush for four years because I was afraid that if I touched it I'd be the one who finished it off.
So it was flaking when they rolled in.
It matters later.