Chapter 1 #2
"Why's the sign say and daughter if the guy in the office isn't your—" He stopped. Physically stopped, like a truck hitting a curb. "Oh."
"Yeah."
"Oh, that's—"
"Yep."
"Do you want me to not have asked that?"
"I want you to hand me the three-eighths and never mention it again," I said, "and then I want you to tell me one thing about Pennsylvania, because I've never been east of Albuquerque and I've got nine days of small talk to fill."
He handed me the three-eighths. Right one, first time, which put him ahead of most of the men I've worked next to.
"It's green," said Bear.
"That's it? That's the whole thing?"
"You asked for one thing."
"Bear, I asked for one thing rhetorically—"
"It's really green," he said, with enormous feeling, "and there's a foundry, and my mother lives four streets from where she was born, and in October the whole hill behind the clubhouse goes orange and Roman pretends he doesn't look at it."
I stopped with my hand in the frame.
"That's better," I said.
"That was three things."
"That was the correct number of things, Bear. Well done. Go eat your sponge."
Thorne came out at seven to lock the pumps.
He stopped by the lift. Looked at the Dodge. Looked at the wall where the four bikes weren't, because they were across the road.
"They didn't take the number," he said.
"No."
"Did you tell them not to?"
"I told them where the office was."
"Mm." He wiped a thumb along the fender of the Dodge and inspected it. "You know, if you'd been friendlier, I might have come down a little."
That is a masterpiece, that sentence. I want to have it framed. In one motion he made his refusal my fault, made his cruelty conditional on my personality, and offered a future kindness that will never be redeemable because the condition will never be met. Nine words. The man should teach.
"Was I unfriendly?"
"You told the big one his coil was for rich men."
"He was standing in front of me holding a ninety-four dollar receipt like a hymn book, Gerald."
"Elodie." Head tilt. Gentle. "It's not the joke. It's that you make them, and then people remember the shop as somewhere they got laughed at."
"They remember the shop as somewhere the bike got fixed."
"They remember how they felt," he said, and he was right, and that's the worst thing about him, that he is so frequently right about small things and it never once means anything good.
"They felt fine, Gerald."
"Did they."
"The big one shook my hand and said he'd have ridden to Flagstaff on that coil and never known why he was ruining his summer. The woman asked me where I learned it. That's how they felt."
"And where did you tell her you learned it?"
The question sat there in the lot between us with the pumps ticking as they cooled.
"I told her here," I said.
"Well." Thorne looked up at the sign, and then away, the way he always does, in the manner of a man passing a piece of furniture he inherited and has never especially liked. "That's true, isn't it."
He turned. Then, over his shoulder, mild as milk: "Marisol says the stove's smoking again."
"It smokes when the flue's cold."
"Well. Maybe don't let it get cold." Pause. "And there's dishes."
The green door. Soft. Never a slam.
At nine I climbed the loft ladder and lay down in my clothes because it was forty-one degrees and I'd banked the stove low to make the wood last.
At nine-twenty somebody knocked on the bay door.
Not the office door. The bay door, down at the bottom, three knuckles, twice, the way you'd knock on a shop when you want the mechanic and not the owner.
I came down the ladder mad. I want that noted. I came down the ladder in a truly foul temper, planning to tell whoever it was that we opened at seven, and I hauled the man-door open onto the cold.
Cricket. And Dutch. And a third man I hadn't seen, standing further back, hands in his jacket, looking at the sign above the bay with an expression I couldn't read from there.
At Cricket's feet were two cardboard boxes, taped, unlabeled.
"Don't open them in the lot," she said.
"What is that."
"Two top-end gasket kits, a set of pushrods, and eleven dollars of respect." She held up a hand before I could get my mouth going. "They're not on your floor. They're on the gravel. Gravel's the county's. I asked."
"You did not ask."
"I asked Bear, and Bear said probably, and that's a legal opinion in some states."
I stood there in the doorway with the cold coming in around me and I did not know what to do with my face.
"Why," I said.
"Because Dutch has been riding two hundred miles on a bad note and nobody in four states told him what it was," said Cricket. "And you did it from under a truck."
"That's not a reason to buy me gaskets."
"No," said the third man, from out in the dark, and his voice was not what I expected at all — quiet, and dry, and put together like a man reading out a will. "It's a reason to find out what else you can hear."
He stepped up into the light off the pump canopy.
Older than Cricket. Not old. A long face, grey coming in at the temples on one side only, which is a thing I've never understood about men, and eyes that went once around the lot — the sign, the stove pipe, the loft window with the blanket in it — and came back to me having done arithmetic of his own.
I did not like being read. I have a policy.
"And you are?"
"Gideon Marsh." A pause exactly one beat too long. "Ash Fork charter. Two hours west."
"You rode two hours to look at boxes on gravel?"
"I rode two hours because Cricket called me and said there was a woman here who diagnosed a fuel fault by ear at sixty feet and then referred us to a machinist she doesn't speak to.
" He tilted his head — not like Thorne, not gentle, more like a man lining up a shot.
"I wanted to see if she was exaggerating. "
"She was."
"Was she."
"It was closer to eighty feet," I said. "But there was wind, so I don't count it."
And Gideon Marsh, President of the Ash Fork charter, thirty-seven years old, a man I would later learn had not laughed audibly in front of another human being in something like fourteen months —
— made a noise like a door hinge giving up.
"Right," he said, when he'd recovered. "Ms. Vasquez. Would you like to have an extremely boring conversation about torque specs?"
I looked at the boxes on the gravel.
I looked at the green door, dark now, and the office window, and the stove pipe with its thin apologetic smoke.
"Wheel them inside," I said, "and if anybody asks, they came in on the county."