Chapter 1
Alma
The letter arrived on a Monday, which is the day of the week designed for bad news.
I'd been at my desk since six-thirty, working through a backlog of quarterly returns for a client who treated his receipts the way a child treats Halloween candy — gathered indiscriminately, hoarded without system, and presented to me in shoeboxes that smelled faintly of cigar smoke.
I had four monitors. I had a label maker.
I had a coffee mug that said Trust Me, I'm an Accountant, which my sister had given me as a joke and which I used unironically because I did, in fact, want to be trusted, and I was, in fact, an accountant.
I was thirty-eight minutes into the work when our office manager set a slim manila envelope on the corner of my desk and said, "This came certified. "
I looked at the return address. Holloway & Pine, Attorneys at Law. Ember Falls, Virginia.
I knew before I opened it. My uncle Tomás had died on a Saturday, of a stroke nobody saw coming, and my mother had been calling me every day since with the kind of grief that came out as logistics.
Mija, the funeral is Tuesday. Mija, the flowers — should we do gardenias or lilies, he liked both.
Mija, your tío didn't have a will, did he?
Or did he? Nobody knows. The funeral had been a week ago.
I'd taken three days off, flown out to Roanoke, driven the rental to Ember Falls, and stood at a gravesite in a dress that wasn't black because Tomás had hated black at funerals.
He'd told me once, leaning against a Harley with grease under his nails and a beer in his hand, Mija, when I go, make them wear color.
Make them sing. None of this funeral parlor business.
So I wore navy. My mother wore red. We sang the songs in Spanish that he'd taught us when we were small, and a man named Diesel — who, I gathered, was a friend of my uncle's and apparently the president of some kind of motorcycle organization — had stood at the back of the gathering and removed his hat and held it over his heart for the entire ceremony.
After the funeral, I flew back to Denver. I told myself I was processing. I was not processing. I was numb, which is processing's lazier cousin.
The envelope from Holloway & Pine sat unopened on my desk for two hours.
I worked around it. I finished the shoebox client's Q3.
I made coffee. I called a colleague back about a partnership issue.
I told myself I would open the envelope at lunch.
At lunch, I told myself I would open it after lunch.
By three in the afternoon, my hands were vibrating with the particular frequency of bad decisions deferred, and I picked up the envelope and tore the seal and read the letter standing up because sitting felt presumptuous.
The letter was three pages.
The first page was condolences and credentials.
The second page was the standard language of a will being read at distance — the deceased, Tomás Emiliano Navarro, has bequeathed — and listed the items, which were not many.
A house I had played in as a child. A shop I had handed wrenches to my uncle in.
A 1948 Indian Chief motorcycle that he had loved more than most people loved their own children.
Some savings. A small life insurance policy.
The third page was the clause.
I read it twice. Then I sat down, because reading something twice while standing makes you look like you're auditioning for a part, and then I read it a third time, sitting.
Item 8.4 — Marriage Condition. My uncle had specified that the shop — building, land, equipment, name, client list, everything — transferred to me on the condition that I be lawfully married within one hundred eighty days of his date of death.
If I was not married at the conclusion of that period, the shop reverted to my cousin Diego Navarro, who, the will helpfully specified, had to be similarly lawfully married to take possession, but who, I knew without checking, had been engaged for two years and would have a courthouse appointment booked within the week if he caught wind of the clause.
I closed the letter. I put it on the desk. I stared at the ceiling tile directly above my chair for a full ninety seconds.
Then I called my mother.
She picked up on the third ring. She said, in Spanish, "Mija, I was just thinking of you," because my mother was a woman who had never once admitted that the timing was anything other than telepathic.
I said, "Mom. Tomás left me the shop."
She said, "Oh, mija, that's wonderful."
I said, "There's a clause."
She listened while I read the third page out loud. When I was done, there was a silence on her end so long I thought the line had dropped.
Then she laughed.
It was not a small laugh. It was a full belly laugh, the kind my mother only gave to things that were either delightful or so absurd they had to be honored with full volume.
She laughed until she had to set down whatever she was holding — I heard something clatter — and then she said, gasping, "Mija, that is so Tomás.
That is exactly what your uncle would do. "
I said, "Mom, this isn't funny."
She said, "Oh, it's a little funny. It's a little funny, Alma. He left you the thing he loved most and made you fight your cousin to keep it. That's a love letter."
I said, "It's a will."
She said, "Mija, your uncle didn't believe in wills. He believed in tests."
I said, "What am I supposed to do?"
She paused. She was, I realized, getting ready to say something she had been thinking about for several days. My mother is a woman who organizes her advice the way I organize my receipts.
She said, gently, "Let Diego have it."
I said, "No."
She said, "Mija, it's a building. It's a business. It's grease and trouble. You have a good job. You have a life in Denver. Let Diego have the headache."
I said, "Mom. Diego does not love that shop.
He has never loved that shop. Tomás gave him a job there when he was nineteen and Diego stole from the register and Tomás still gave him a Christmas card every year because Tomás was incapable of holding a grudge.
Diego would sell the shop within six months.
He'd sell the lifts to a pawnbroker and the building to a developer and he'd put a vape store there and call it growth. Mom. Diego is a vape store."
She was quiet.
I said, "I'm not letting him have it."
She said, "Then you need to get married, Alma."
I said, "Yes. Apparently I do."
She said, "You are not dating anyone."
I said, "Correct."
She said, "You have not dated anyone in two years."
I said, "Correct."
She said, "Mija, please don't do anything stupid."
I said, "Mom. I am the least stupid person you know."
She said, "That is true. That is also why I worry."
We hung up. I sat with the letter for another hour. By the time I went home that night, I had drafted, in my head, a five-step plan, of which the first step was quit job and the last step was acquire husband. The middle steps were all logistics. I was good at logistics.
By Tuesday morning, I had submitted my resignation.
By Tuesday afternoon, I had given notice on my apartment.
By Wednesday, I had a moving company scheduled, a storage unit reserved, and a U-Haul booked for the following Saturday. I do not believe in lingering. Lingering is for people who haven't done the math.
I drove to Ember Falls on a Sunday in the middle of September, with everything I owned in a fifteen-foot truck and a 2014 Civic on a tow dolly behind it.
The Blue Ridge came up out of the horizon the way the Blue Ridge does — gradually, then all at once, blue stacked on blue, the mountains closing around the valley like cupped hands.
I cried for twenty miles. Then I stopped crying and started making a grocery list, because crying without a plan was a waste of perfectly good salt.
The shop sat on the corner of Mill and Vance.
Two bays, a small office, a parts room, and a flat above with two bedrooms and a kitchen that hadn't been updated since Tomás bought the building in 1994.
I let myself in with the key Holloway & Pine had FedEx'd me, and I stood in the middle of the showroom floor and breathed.
It smelled like him. That was the first thing.
Motor oil, yes, and the chalky undertone of brake dust, and the particular sweetness of old upholstery — but also him.
The cologne he wore on Sundays. The pomade he used.
The faint coffee scent that lived in the grout of the office floor because Tomás had spilled coffee at least once a day for thirty years and had cleaned it up roughly never.
I set down my purse on the front counter and I stood there in the middle of my dead uncle's life's work, and I made my first decision as the owner of Navarro Custom Cycles.
I said, out loud, "Okay, tío. Let's go to work."
The first week was triage. I unpacked half my things and ignored the other half.
I converted the apartment's second bedroom into a temporary office because the shop's actual office was full of things that defied categorization.
I found Tomás's books in a filing cabinet that had three drawers, two of which were locked and one of which contained a box of unmarked floppy disks, a Sears catalog from 1987, and a coffee mug full of receipts.
I found the client list. It existed on index cards in a shoebox under the front counter.
The cards were color-coded by Tomás's private system, which I learned through trial and error meant: blue for current customers, red for current customers who hadn't paid yet, yellow for current customers who hadn't paid in over a year but whom Tomás considered "family," green for customers Tomás disliked, and white for customers Tomás had forgotten the relationship with entirely.
I imposed a spreadsheet on the shoebox. I cross-referenced names against the bank records I'd pulled from Tomás's accounts.
I sent invoices, gently, to the yellow cards.
I sent invoices, sternly, to the red cards.
I left the green and white cards alone for now because Tomás's grudges and amnesias were not my emergencies.
By the end of week two, I had a functioning client list, a functioning invoicing system, and a functioning bank reconciliation that revealed Tomás had been operating at a slight loss for the last three years of his life.
Not because the work wasn't there. Because he had been doing too much of it for free.
Pro bono wasn't the right phrase. It was more like pro amistad.
For friendship. He'd been holding the shop open with love.
The love was admirable. The accounting was a crime.
By the end of week three, I'd opened the shop's second bay for the first time in two months and taken in three jobs — one suspension rebuild, one carburetor service, and one electrical issue on a Sportster that I diagnosed myself with my uncle's old multimeter and a great deal of stubbornness.
I had grown up in this shop. I had spent summers at this shop.
I could not call myself a mechanic, but I could call myself someone who knew where the tools were and was not afraid to read a manual.
The marriage problem, I had not solved.
It sat on my desk, in the form of the original three-page letter, paperclipped to a fresh page on which I had drawn, in pencil, a list with two columns.
Column A: Potential Candidates.
Column B: Pros / Cons.
Column A was, I will be honest with you, blank.
I had thought about asking a college friend.
I'd dismissed it because the college friend was now married and her husband had a sense of humor about a lot of things but not, I suspected, that.
I had thought about a Craigslist ad. I had laughed out loud at my own kitchen table.
I had thought about my high school boyfriend — the one I'd dated for three years and parted from amicably and who lived in Phoenix and ran a chiropractic practice — and I'd actually drafted the email, then deleted it, then drafted it again, then deleted it again.
He was a good man. He had also moved on.
Reopening that door for the purpose of legal convenience felt cruel to both of us.
I sat at my kitchen table on a Sunday night in late September with the list in front of me, three weeks into my new life, and I admitted to myself the thing I had been trying not to admit.
I needed help.
I was excellent at numbers. I was excellent at systems. I was excellent at the kinds of problems that yielded to columns and categories and the patient, methodical application of order.
I was not excellent at this. This required a person, and persons were the one variable I had never figured out how to control.
I closed the notebook. I rinsed my coffee cup. I went to bed.
The next morning, a man I had never met would walk into my shop carrying a set of exhaust brackets and an invoice from eight months ago, and he would change the math.
I just didn't know it yet.