Chapter 5
Elodie
It took him three days, and there was no magic in it, and when he told me how he'd done it I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a tire.
"Parts suppliers."
"Parts suppliers."
"You called parts suppliers."
"Every one in four counties." He was leaning in the man-door with his arms folded and rain coming off the canopy behind him in a sheet.
"Because a woman who can hear a wasp is a woman who's rebuilding something, and a woman who's rebuilding something in Arizona in April is buying NOS Shovelhead cases, and there are eleven people in this state who stock those, and nine of them answer the phone. "
"And?"
"And the fourth one said, 'Oh, you mean Cinder.'"
"He did not."
"He said, 'Oh, you mean Cinder, tell her the left case is in and she still owes me for the last one.'"
"That's Marty. Marty's a snitch—"
"Marty's a small businessman with an outstanding receivable," said Gideon, "and he is the reason I'm standing in your doorway at two in the morning holding a boot."
He held up the boot.
It was, at that point, three days since the Rust Run, and I had spent all three of them limping around the shop in one boot and one sneaker with a hole in it, and I had told Marisol I'd left it at the tire shop, and I had not stopped thinking about the fence rail for approximately four consecutive minutes of any hour.
"Give me my boot."
"Say the thing."
"I'm not saying a thing."
"There's a whole speech people do—"
"Give me my boot, Gideon."
He gave me my boot. And then, because he is a man who reads contracts, and because the boot was heavier than a boot, he watched me find the folded paper stuffed down in the toe where the wad usually goes.
I pulled it out. Opened it.
It was a photograph, printed on office paper. A scrap tray, on a bench, in a shop I'd never seen, with the fasteners sorted in five neat piles.
Written under it in ballpoint: Thread pitch. Thursday, as promised. — G.M.
"Oh," I said.
The rain came down on the apron.
"That's five piles."
"Five sizes."
"You did coarse and fine separately."
"I did coarse and fine separately."
"On a Thursday, Gideon. You had a table meeting on Thursday, I know you did, Bear told me about the thing with the trailer—"
"I did it before the meeting."
"How long did it take?"
He looked at the doorframe. "I'm not going to answer that."
"How long—"
"Two hours and forty minutes," said the president of the Ash Fork charter, "and Tuck came in halfway through and asked if I was okay, and I said yes, and he did not believe me, and I want you to know that my standing in that clubhouse has taken a measurable hit."
"Elodie—"
"Come in out of the rain," I said, "and shut the door behind you," and my voice did not sound like mine at all.
He came in. He shut the door. The rain kept up on the roof, that big flat roaring you only get on corrugated steel, which is the best sound in the world and which I had never once in nine years listened to with another person in the building.
The bay doors were up about four feet, the way I leave them when I'm running the stove and the solvent, and past them the highway was black and shining and empty and the rain was coming in a foot onto the concrete and stopping.
One work light. On a hook. Swinging slightly, because I'd knocked it.
"How long have you got," I said.
"What?"
"How long have you got. Before you have to be back."
"Elodie, I run the charter. Nobody checks on me. That's the entire — that's the whole tragedy of the job, nobody's ever once asked me where I've been."
"So the answer is—"
"The answer is I've got until you tell me to leave," he said, "and I'd like to be extremely clear that I've had that answer for eleven days and I've been managing it very badly."
I put the boot down on the bench.
"Come here," I said.
He crossed the bay slowly, and stopped an arm's length off, and did not touch me, which nearly killed me.
"Say it out loud," he said. "I need you to say it out loud, because you make a joke every time something's about to be true, and I'll take the joke, but I want the other thing first."
"That's not fair."
"It's completely fair."
"You're using my own—" I stopped. Breathed. The rain roared. "Fine. Here's the out-loud version, and you don't get to look at me while I do it, so — okay, look at the floor. Look at the floor, Gideon."
He looked at the floor.
"I have been alone in this building for nine years," I said.
"And I'm not sad about it, I want that on the record, I've got the tools and I've got the sign and I've got a wasp story now.
But at the fence you asked me what time it was and I lied to myself for four seconds about what the answer was, and I have never done that in my life, I have never once been late for anything because of a person. "
"Elodie—"
"Floor."
"Floor."
"And I have thought about your hands for three days," I said, "which is unbecoming and specific, and I would like you to stop looking at the floor now."
He looked up.
The first kiss was not graceful, because I moved and he moved and neither of us communicated, and I got him somewhere near the jaw and he laughed into my hair, and then we got it right on the second attempt like adults.
His hands went to my face. Both of them. That's what did it — not anything else, just a man holding my whole face like it was a thing you'd want to keep from getting knocked over.
"Okay," I said, into his mouth.
"Okay?"
"Okay, that's — yes. That's — do that with your—"
"With my what."
"Do not make me be technical."
"You're always technical."
"I'm technical about machines—"
"You're technical about everything, it's the best thing about you," he said, and got his thumb along my jaw and tipped my head and did it properly, slow, thorough, unhurried in a way that I found genuinely offensive given the circumstances, and I made a noise into his mouth that I would deny in court.
I got my hands under his jacket. He got the jacket off. It went on the floor, which is a filthy floor, and he did not care, and I decided I'd get it cleaned and never tell him.
"Wait," I said.
He stopped instantly. Hands off. Half a step back.
"No — not wait wait. Wait as in—" I looked around my own shop, which suddenly had a lot of surfaces and none of them right. "Everything in here is either sharp, cold, or covered in gear oil."
"I've noticed."
"The bench is cold and there's a vise on it."
"I saw the vise."
"The floor is concrete and it's forty-four degrees."
"I'm aware of the floor."
"And the loft," I said, "is up a ladder, and the mattress is a crime, and there's a hole in the roof over the foot of it that I've been meaning to—"
He put a finger over my mouth.
Then he turned and looked at the middle of my bay, and at the low wheeled creeper trolley sitting there where it has sat for twenty-five years, and I watched a man arrive at an idea.
"No," I said.
"Elodie."
"That's a tool."
"Everything in here's a tool."
"That is a tool for lying under trucks—"
"It's padded," said Gideon Marsh, president of the Ash Fork charter, "it's the only padded object in this entire building, it's six inches off a floor you've already told me is forty-four degrees, and it has wheels."
There was a silence.
"Say the last part again," I said.
"It has wheels."
"...Okay."
What I will tell you about it is this.
That it started with me sitting on it and him kneeling on the concrete in front of me, and that within about a minute I understood the wheels were not a joke, because every time I moved the whole thing shifted six inches the way it always does, and I had to grab the frame of the lift to hold myself in place, and he laughed against my collarbone and said, "Problem?
" and I said something unrepeatable about his mother's county.
That my coveralls came off one arm at a time because I refused to stand up and he refused to make me, and that he said, "These were your father's," not as a question, and I said yes, and he folded them — folded them, on the bench, in the middle of everything, that maniac — and I fell in love with him somewhere in that four-second interval and have never got out of it since.
That his hands were exactly what I had spent three days being unbecoming about.
Careful. Slow. Deliberate in a way that mapped precisely onto how he handed me a feeler gauge, and I told him that, out loud, and he said, "That's what you're thinking about?
" and I said, "You've clearly never met me," and then stopped being able to say things for a while.
That when it was my turn to be the one taking, I got him flat on the creeper on his back — which is what a creeper is for, and I said so, and he laughed so hard the whole thing rolled a foot to the left — and I braced one boot against the base of the lift and I could feel the cold coming off the concrete on one side of me and the stove going on the other, and the rain roaring on the roof, and the highway out past the open bay doors with one truck going through every four minutes, and the work light swinging over us throwing our shadow up the wall and back down.
That at one point the work light swung far enough to throw the whole bay into shadow and I said "wait, wait — the light," and he reached up without looking and caught the cord and stopped it dead, one-handed, on the first try, and I said, "How," and he said, "I've been staring at that light for eleven days, Elodie, I know exactly where it is," and that is possibly the single most attractive sentence ever spoken in the state of Arizona.
That I laughed at the wrong moment and he stopped and said "what," and I said "the bay doors are open," and he said "yes," and I said "there's a truck coming," and he said, with enormous patience, "Elodie, there is always a truck coming, we are four hundred feet from an interstate, this is a permanent condition of your life," and I said "fair," and we carried on, and the truck went by, and I have thought about that truck driver approximately once a month ever since.
That he said my name once, low, in the middle of it, and it was not Cinder.