Epilogue
Elodie
Odette turned up eight months later with a suitcase and a haircut she'd clearly done herself in a motel bathroom.
She stood in my lot for eleven minutes before she came in. I watched her the whole time through the bay door and did not go out, because there are moments a person has to finish on their own.
Eventually she came in.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"I'm not — I don't want anything."
"Odette, you've got a suitcase."
"I know." Her sleeves were over her hands. Eight months and a different state and the sleeves were still over the hands. "I know. It's — it's optics. I'm aware of the optics."
I put the wrench down.
"Where's Marisol?"
"Scottsdale. With Dad."
"How is she?"
Odette looked genuinely thrown, which told me something about the eight months.
"Nobody asks me that."
"I'm asking."
"She's — fine. She's got a job at a dealership doing finance and she's good at it, Elodie, she's really good at it, she came home in March and told a story about a man she'd talked into a warranty package and she told it like a war story.
" Odette pulled her sleeves down further.
"And Dad laughed. And I sat there and thought: oh.
This is a family business. I've been in a family business my whole life and the business is people. "
"Yeah."
"They're fine. They're fine, that's the whole thing. He never once thinks about it. I asked him at Christmas and he looked at me like I'd asked about the weather in 2009."
"I know."
"He said, and I'm quoting — he said, 'She had nine years of a roof.'"
"Yeah," I said. "That's him."
Odette stood there in the middle of my shop with the suitcase.
"I watched," she said. "That's the whole — that's my entire crime, I know it's not the same as hers, I know that, and I also know that it's not different enough to be worth explaining, so I'm not going to explain it.
I stood in the kitchen for nine years and I did nothing and I said sorry at the sink. "
The compressor kicked in. Ran twenty seconds. Kicked out. It had never been the tank drain and Izzy has never apologized.
"You gave me the jacket," I said.
She looked up.
"The night of the Rust Run. You brought it out to the driveway and you didn't say anything and you went back inside.
" I picked the wrench back up, because I needed something to do with my face.
"You want to know what the difference is between you and Marisol, that's it.
That's the whole thing. It's one jacket, and it took you nine years, and it's still the difference. "
Odette started crying in a way that suggested she'd been holding it since Scottsdale.
"Can you type?" I said.
"What?"
"Can you type. Can you answer a phone without making it worse. Because I've got a front desk that is currently a milk crate with a landline on it, and Cricket keeps 'helping,' and last week she told a man from Winslow that his transmission had 'gone to be with the Lord.'"
"Elodie—"
"Eleven dollars an hour, which is bad, and it goes up in March, which is better, and there's a room above the clubhouse that Bear will pretend he doesn't know you're in."
"Bear?"
"You'll meet Bear. Bear is a very large man who will apologize to you for approximately six weeks and then one day he'll stop, and that's how you'll know you live here."
She did meet Bear. He apologized for eight weeks, which is a record, and then one Thursday in February he walked past her desk and said, "Odette, your handwriting's terrible," and she burst into tears and then laughed, and Bear looked at me with the expression of a man who has detonated something he cannot identify.
"What did I do."
"You did it right, Bear."
"I said her handwriting was terrible."
"Yes."
"It is terrible—"
"Bear," I said, "go away."
Her handwriting is terrible. Nine months in, she started writing the noises down phonetically, exactly as the customer said them, which is what I asked for, and the result is a logbook that reads like a lunatic's diary.
TKK-tkk-tkk on left, worse when cold, "like a dog under the car.
" A ROOOOO but only over 50. "It sounds sad. "
I have made engineering decisions off "it sounds sad." Twice. Both times I was right.
Which is getting ahead of myself. On the day, in the shop, with the suitcase still standing in the doorway, I kept my face absolutely, perfectly straight and said:
"And you're going to write down the noises. When people describe them, you write the exact words they use. Not your interpretation. Their words. That's the job."
"That's the job?"
"That's ninety percent of the job."
"What's the other ten?"
"The other ten is that when a man comes in at four on a Friday and says his wife's car is making a noise and he's sorry and he knows we're closing — you don't tell him we're closing.
" I put the wrench down. "You take the keys.
You write down the noise. You tell him Monday.
And then he goes home and tells his wife that somebody was decent to him, and that's the actual product. Everything else is parts."
Odette wiped her face with a sleeve that was already over her hand.
"Who told you that?"
"My father. Around 1997. I didn't understand it until I was twenty-eight." I shrugged. "You've got a head start. Don't waste it."
"Elodie—"
"Don't."
"One thing and then I'll never say it again, and you're allowed to hate it.
" She got her chin up, which cost her something.
"I'm not here because I'm sorry. I am sorry, and it's worth nothing, I've had eight months to work that out.
I'm here because I watched you stand in a room and say no to a man with a folder, and I have never once in my life said no to anybody, and I'd like to learn how, and there isn't a class. "
I stood there in my own shop with an engine hoist behind me and a sign on the wall.
"Okay," I said. "That one I'll take."
"Okay?"
"Okay. There's a milk crate. Go sit on it."
She sat on the milk crate. She sat on it for four months, until Cricket found a desk at an auction in Winslow for nineteen dollars, and Odette cried about a desk in front of six people and not one of them said a word about it, and that's Ash Fork.
They inked my name in November.
Ash Fork style, which I had been warned about by three separate people from Pennsylvania in increasingly serious tones, and which turned out to be a bonfire in a gravel yard, four dentists with amplifiers, ninety-one people, a pig that had been in the ground since Thursday, and absolutely no discernible order of proceedings whatsoever.
Odile Kade flew in. Third time in a year. She arrived at four in the afternoon, surveyed the yard for approximately ninety seconds, and said, "Where's the list?"
"There isn't a list."
"There's always a list."
"Ma'am," said Tuck, "we've never had a list."
Odile turned to me. "How do you know when it's started?"
"I think it started an hour ago."
"How do you know?"
"I don't think anybody knows, Odile."
"In Hollow Ash," she said, with the terrible calm of a woman making notes for later, "we have a sequence.
There's a reading. There's a moment of silence for the ones who aren't here.
There's a specific song, and it is not played by dentists.
" She accepted a beer from Bear without looking at him.
"This is anarchy and I'm having the time of my life. Get me a chair, I'm going to critique."
She critiqued for six hours.
Some of the notes, delivered live, at volume, to whoever was nearest:
"Nobody has said anything. In Hollow Ash somebody says something. There's a man who says something."
"Who's the man?" said Bear.
"It varies. That's the point, Bear, it's an honor."
"Could you say something?"
Odile Kade stopped with her beer halfway up.
"...Could I."
"You're the oldest person here by a lot."
"That is not the argument I'd have led with, but yes." She got up out of the chair. She got up out of the chair with a great deal of production. "Turn the dentists off."
Somebody turned the dentists off. Ninety-one people went quiet in a gravel yard in a way I have never heard ninety-one people go quiet.
"I'm not going to make a speech," said Odile, "because I don't know most of you and I've had three beers.
"But there's a girl here whose father died with his name on a building, and a man took the building, and it was legal, and she was nineteen.
And I want everybody standing in this yard to understand that she got out of it with a toolbox.
Not with money. Not with lawyers. Not because anybody saved her.
She got out with a toolbox and one word. "
She pointed her bottle at me.
"So here's my note, since I'm told I have notes.
When they ink her name tonight, don't do it because she's Gideon's.
Half of you are going to and I can't stop you and it's a fine reason as far as it goes.
" She sat back down. "Do it because in about four years, when one of you is in trouble, she's the one who's going to say the word.
"That's all. Put the dentists back on."
They put the dentists back on.
Odile has since produced, unasked, a two-page document titled NOTES ON THE ASH FORK CEREMONY (CONSTRUCTIVE) which has been laminated and hung in our clubhouse and which Tuck refers to as "the Geneva Conventions."
Dashiell Okonkwo did the ink, because he flew in for it, because apparently that's just what happens now.
He set up on a folding table by the fire with a light clamped to a pole, and he worked the way Gideon hands over a feeler gauge, and he asked me exactly one question before he started.
"Whose name?"
"Marsh."
"You sure?"
"Are you supposed to ask that?"
"I ask everybody." Thorn didn't look up. "I've had two people say no in nine years and both of them thanked me later, so I keep asking, and everyone keeps being annoyed."
"I'm sure."
"Then hold still and stop talking, because you talk with your arms and I've noticed."