Chapter 3
Elodie
The house rules were never written down. That's their power. You can't argue with a rule that doesn't exist; you can only fail it.
Rule one: the hot water is finite and you are last.
Rule two: the shop is a business and the house is a home, and you live in the shop.
Rule three: nobody has ever once said any of this out loud, so if you bring it up you're the one who made it ugly.
I got in the back door at six-forty in the morning to do the dishes, because there were dishes, because there are always dishes, because a household of three people generates dishes at a rate that suggests they're eating in shifts around the clock out of spite.
Marisol was at the table with her phone.
"You smell like a campfire," she said.
"Good morning to you too."
"I'm not being mean. You smell like a campfire. It's in the towels now."
"Then don't use my towel."
"I don't use your towel, Elodie, I don't know where your towel is, that's exactly the—" She stopped. Reset. Smiled. Marisol is twenty-four and has her father's talent without his patience, which makes her worse at it and easier to survive. "There's a thing on the counter for you."
There was a thing on the counter. It was a list.
Dishes. Trash. The gutter over the porch. Odette's car makes a noise.
"Odette's car makes a noise," I read out.
"It does."
"What kind of noise?"
"I don't know, I'm not the — you know." She waved a hand at me, at all of me, at the concept. "The noise person."
"Is it a rrr noise or a tk tk tk noise?"
"Why are you making sounds at me before eight."
"Because there are two noises, Marisol, and one of them is fifty dollars and one of them is nine hundred, and I would like to know which of my mornings I'm losing."
Odette came in then. Twenty-one. Community college, nursing track, a sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled over her hands, and the particular walk of a person crossing her own kitchen like it's somebody else's.
"It's a tk tk tk," she said quietly. "But it only does it turning left."
"Then it's a CV joint and it's cheap and I'll do it Sunday."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank her," said Marisol. "Then she'll bring it up."
"Bring what up?"
"The thing." Marisol did not look up from her phone. "The favor. She does it and then it's in the room forever."
"Marisol, I have never once—"
"You did it with the water heater."
"I fixed the water heater," I said, "because the water heater was going to burn the house down, and I mentioned it exactly one time, six months later, when your father told me I don't contribute to the household."
"See, you're bringing it up now."
And that's the thing, isn't it. That's the actual architecture of it. You can't defend yourself against a charge of keeping score without producing the score.
I put the plate in the rack.
"It's a CV joint," I said. "It's forty dollars and an afternoon. Sunday."
And Odette looked at the floor, and I looked at Odette, and the thing about my stepsisters that took me six years to work out is that one of them is cruel and one of them is frightened and I can never remember which is which until it's already too late.
Because the frightened one doesn't help you.
She stands there with her sleeves over her hands and lets it happen and then apologizes in a whisper at the sink, and by the third year you understand that from where you're standing there is no practical difference between the girl who swings and the girl who watches, and by the sixth year you understand there is, actually, and that difference is going to cost you something one day.
Odette caught me in the hallway on the way out. She does this. She has done this for six years — waits until the room's empty and then delivers the apology nobody can hear.
"She doesn't mean it about the towels."
"She means it about the towels, Odette, she's meant it about the towels since 2019."
"I could — I mean, I could say something."
"You could."
"It's just that when I say something it gets worse for—" She stopped.
She'd heard it. To her credit, that's a thing she does; she hears it about a second and a half after she says it, which is exactly long enough to be useless.
"For you. It gets worse for you. That's what I was going to say and it isn't why. "
"No."
"No." She looked at the floor. "Sunday's fine for the car. Whenever. It doesn't matter."
"It's a CV joint, Odette. It'll snap on the on-ramp and then it'll matter enormously."
"Okay."
"Sunday," I said, and went out, because the alternative was standing in a hallway forgiving somebody for the ninth consecutive year.
Thorne came through with his coffee.
"There's a man in the lot," he said.
"There's usually a man in the lot. It's a garage."
"Same man as last night."
"Then he's a customer."
"Mm." He looked out the window over the sink, past my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the coffee. "Does he have a bike that needs work?"
"He has a bike."
"That's not the same answer."
"No," I agreed, and put a plate in the rack.
Gideon Marsh turned up every day for eleven days and did not fix a single thing.
Day one he brought coffee, which I refused, and then drank.
Day two he brought coffee and a chair. An actual chair, folding, aluminum, from a hardware store, and he set it against the wall in the corner of my bay where there'd never been a chair, and sat in it.
"What are you doing."
"Supervising."
"You're not qualified to supervise me."
"That's why it's going so well."
"Supervising what?"
"The work."
"Gideon, you cannot see the work from there, there is an entire motorcycle between you and the work."
"Then I'm supervising the motorcycle," he said, and opened a folder, and that was the end of the negotiation and the beginning of eleven days.
Day three he read a contract in the chair for four hours and looked up eleven times, which I counted, which I am not proud of.
Day four he brought Bear, who lifted the transmission case onto the bench without being asked and then apologized for it.
Day five he asked me a question about a magneto that he already knew the answer to, and I called him on it, and he said, "I wanted to hear how you'd say it," which is the most dangerous sentence a man has ever said to me and he said it like a weather report.
"That's a line."
"It's not a line."
"It's absolutely a line, Gideon, that's the kind of thing men say in films right before a helicopter—"
"It's a line if it isn't true." He turned a page.
"I've had eleven people explain a magneto to me and every one of them explained the same magneto.
You explain the man who broke it. That's a different skill and I don't have a name for it and I'd like more of it, so I asked a question I knew the answer to. That's the whole confession."
I stood there with a spanner in my hand for probably five full seconds.
"Okay, that's worse," I said.
"How is that worse?"
"Because now it's sincere, and I've got no move for sincere, I've got about ninety moves for a line—"
"I know," said Gideon, and went back to his contract.
Day six he found the coffee can where I keep the eleven-millimeter sockets and did not comment.
Day seven he brought Odette a phone charger for her car because he'd noticed hers was held together with tape, and did it while I was on the phone with Ruben, so I couldn't stop him, and did not mention it after.
Day seven, later, he asked me the question I'd been dreading and got it slightly wrong, which saved us both.
"What was he like?"
"Who?"
"Vasquez." He nodded at the sign through the open bay. "The first one."
"You mean was he good."
"I mean what was he like. I can work out whether he was good from four minutes with his daughter."
And I stood there with a valve spring compressor in my hand and found that I had absolutely nothing prepared, because in nine years not one person had asked me that.
They'd asked how he died. They'd asked how old I was.
Marisol once asked, at a Christmas dinner, whether he'd "been a drinker," in a tone of great sympathy.
"He peeled oranges on the heater," I said.
"...Okay."
"That's the answer. That's the actual answer, don't make the face.
He peeled an orange every day at three o'clock and put the peel on the heater grille so the shop smelled like Christmas, and if you came in at half three you'd think somebody's grandmother worked here, and then you'd look up and there'd be a man under a truck swearing at a Ford.
" I put the compressor down. "That's what he was like.
He made a place smell nice on purpose. It cost him one orange. "
Gideon didn't say anything for a second.
"Do you do it?" he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because oranges are ninety cents each in this town," I said, "and because if it smelled like that in here I'd have to stop working, and I can't afford to stop working, and that's the whole answer, and now you've made me say it, so you can buy the next coffee."
He bought the next coffee. He also, on day ten, left a bag of four oranges on the bench and did not say a word about it, and I did not say a word about it, and I have never told him what I did with them.
Day eight I put the first of the Grimm bikes back together and it fired on the first crank and he stood up out of the chair.
"Sit down."
"I stood up."
"I saw you stand up. Sit down."
"Elodie."
"Gerald is in the office and he can hear a compliment through a cinder block wall, sit down—"
Gideon sat down. And then, from the chair, at a completely conversational volume, said: "That's the best-sounding motor I've heard in a decade."
I turned around with a wrench in my hand and something happening in my throat.
"You are the worst," I said.
"I sat down."
Here's what he actually did, though. Since he fixed nothing, and helped more than anybody has helped me since I was sixteen.
He gave me somebody to be funny in front of.