Chapter 8
Gideon
She did it on a Wednesday, at the Ash Fork clubhouse, in front of nineteen people including a man who had flown in from Pennsylvania the night before because Cricket called him and said you want to be here for this.
I did not arrange it. I want that clear, because it got told wrong immediately and it's still getting told wrong. I said one cruel thing in a garage and rode away, and then a woman with a phone and no help from anybody organized her own reckoning.
Vane came. Of course he came. He came alone in the long car and parked where he was told to park, which was out on the road, and walked in through the gate, and when Bear went to pat him down he lifted his arms with an expression of real delight.
"I've never once had this done," he said. "It's marvelous. Everyone should be searched occasionally. It's clarifying."
"Sit down, Mr. Vane," said Roman Kade.
"Mr. Kade. At last."
"Sit down."
He sat.
"You've had my grandmother followed," said Roman.
"I've had your grandmother photographed, once, at an airport, by a man I no longer employ, and I'd like it on the record in front of everyone here that I found it distasteful and said so.
" Vane folded his hands. "She's also, I'm told, co-signing nothing at present, which is a shame, because I've read her file and she's the most interesting person in either of your charters. "
"Don't talk about her."
"Mr. Kade, I've been talking about all of you for two years.
That's not a threat, it's a job description.
" He glanced around the room, unhurried, the way a man reads a menu.
"You've got a president who thinks in buildings, a vice president who thinks in numbers, a sergeant-at-arms who thinks in doorways, and a woman on a bucket by the exit who I still can't place in a chart and it's been keeping me up. "
"Good," said Cricket, from the door.
"It is good," Vane agreed. "It's the only genuinely good thing that's happened to me this quarter."
Elodie came in at three in a clean shirt with the folder under her arm and set it on the table in front of him, and did not sit.
"I'm going to do this out loud," she said, "in front of these people, because a man told me I owed them that, and he was right, and he was also unkind about it, and both those things are going to be true for a while."
I looked at the floor. Cricket, beside me, made a small noise.
"Mr. Vane. You offered me the deed to my father's building, free and clear, no consideration, in exchange for reporting to you what motorcycles come in and out of my bays."
"That's accurate."
"You paid three-sixty for a building worth two-eighty and you did it in front of witnesses so everyone would understand that money isn't a lever you're subject to."
Vane's eyebrows went up about a millimeter.
"That's — yes," he said. "Nobody's ever said that back to me before."
"You told me there was no or else, and you were right, and that's the cleverest thing anybody's ever done to me, because it meant the only person I could argue with for twenty-four hours was myself." She put her hand flat on the folder. "So here's my answer.
"No.
"Not no for a year. Not no with a version we could revisit. No, forever, and if you come back in five years when I'm broke, which I am about to be, the answer is going to be the same and it's going to be shorter."
Vane did not move.
"And I want to say the second part in front of everyone too," she said, "because if I don't, it'll get said behind me and it'll get said worse.
I thought about it. All night. Twenty-four hours, and I used every one of them, and at four in the morning I got as far as one year before I got up and put my boots on. "
Nobody in the room breathed.
"I'm not sorry that I thought about it," said Elodie Vasquez.
"I'm not going to stand here and pretend I'm a person it never occurred to.
My father's name is on that building and you offered me the chance to put my hand on the wall of a room I've been thrown out of for eleven years, and if that hadn't tempted me I'd be a machine, and machines are what I fix, not what I am. "
She picked up the folder and held it out to him.
"But it was still no at four in the morning," she said, "and it was no at four the morning before, and I want everybody in this room to understand that the reason it was no isn't loyalty and it isn't romance.
It's that I have spent nine years being owned by a man who never raised his voice, and I have learned exactly one thing from it, which is that the second time somebody offers you a room and a number in the same sentence, you say no faster. "
Vane took the folder.
He stood, and buttoned his coat, and looked around at nineteen people, and then back at her.
"That was extremely well done," he said. "Genuinely. I've been refused perhaps a dozen times in my life and never once with the arithmetic included." He tucked the folder under his arm. "I'll send you the sign man's number anyway."
"Don't."
"I'm going to." He walked to the door. "Mr. Kade. Mr. Marsh. It's been a pleasure and I mean that in a way you'll find irritating."
And he left.
And Elodie stood in the middle of my clubhouse with nothing.
That's the part they leave out when they tell it, too.
She walked out of that building at four o'clock that afternoon — her father's building, with the sign and the tools and the peel-burn on the heater grille and the loft and the creeper trolley — and she took a rolling toolbox and a cardboard box of her father's rag and half a bottle of terrible liquor, and that was all, because Vane's people were changing the locks on Friday and everything bolted down was his.
Bear carried the toolbox out to the truck. She let him, which took something.
She stood in the lot for a minute looking up at VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER with the light going orange on it.
"It's a disaster," she said.
"Yeah."
"It's completely the right call and it's an unmitigated disaster and I'm going to be sick in that ditch in about four minutes."
"Elodie."
"Don't apologize yet," she said. "You said a true thing badly and I said a true thing badly and we're both going to be sorry properly later, when I've got somewhere to be sorry in."
"That's what I came to talk about."
She looked at me.
"The vote was on money," I said. "So we asked a different question."
Here is what eleven men, one Cricket and four books' worth of built relationships came up with, and I did approximately none of it, and I have never been prouder of anything in my life.
Ash Fork gave her the bay. The one behind the clubhouse with forty years of junk in it.
Not sold, not leased — given, on a twenty-year peppercorn, drawn by Beth Ann Corrales for free because Beth Ann Corrales read the file and said something under her breath in Spanish.
Eleven-nothing at the table. Tuck moved it.
I want to put his exact words down, because he'll deny them.
"It's a bay," he said. "It's a bay full of a dead mower and nine boxes of Christmas.
It costs this club nothing. It has cost this club nothing for six years and we were all fine with that, and I'd like somebody to explain to me why 'nothing' was acceptable when it was junk and it's a big decision when it's a person. "
"Because of the twenty years," said somebody.
"Twenty years of what? Of not storing a mower?" Tuck looked around. "I voted no on two hundred and forty thousand dollars and I'd do it again. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend that a locked door on an empty room is fiscal responsibility. Move it. Let's go home."
The same Tuck who'd voted no on two-forty voted yes on a bay, because a bay wasn't money, and I've stopped trying to explain that to people who weren't there.
Izzy built it out. Kasimir's Izzy, who flew in on a Sunday with a tape measure and a notebook and looked at that junk-filled bay for eleven minutes and then said, "You've got a beam. Everything else is Tuesday."
I want to record the first conversation between those two women, because eleven men witnessed it and none of us have recovered.
"Where do you want the bench?"
"North wall."
"North wall's your light."
"North wall's my light, that's why I want the bench there."
"You want your bench in your light." Izzy tipped her head. "Where do you want to think?"
Elodie opened her mouth. Closed it.
"...Nobody's ever asked me that."
"Because nobody's ever built you a shop, they've built you a job.
" Izzy drew something. "The bench goes east. You get the north wall empty with a stool in front of it and a light you can turn off, and when a motor beats you, you sit there and you look at it from nine feet away in the dark until it tells you.
Every good mechanic I've ever met has a spot like that and every single one of them is embarrassed about it. "
There was a very long pause.
"East," said Elodie.
"East," said Izzy.
"I'm going to fight you about the compressor line."
"You're going to lose about the compressor line."
She had the roof open for light in nine days. She got the lift in on the eleventh. She fought Elodie about the compressor line for two days and won, and by the end of it they were finishing each other's sentences in a way that frightened Bear.
Wren routed the recovery work. Four counties of it, straight through the new shop — every seized motor and every dead tow that came off a hook now had somewhere to go, which was the difference between a shop and a hobby, and Wren Adeyemi did it in one phone call and then said, "Don't thank me, it's self-interest, I'm sick of towing to Kingman. "
Cricket found the customers. God knows how. Nobody knows how. Cricket does not explain.
And Odile Kade co-signed the loan.
Forty-one thousand dollars for tooling, at seventy-nine years old, in a bank in Flagstaff, in a cardigan, having flown out for the second time in a month. The loan officer asked her whether she understood the obligation of a co-signer at her age.