9. Mira
MIRA
"Drink," he said. "Before Zoya finds the good stuff and hides it again."
"Is there good stuff?"
"There was. Once. I remember it fondly."
I drank. It was bitter enough to strip paint, and I said so, and Fedya laughed so hard he had to set down the wrench he was holding.
"That's the face," he said. "Everybody makes it the first time. Damian used to make it too. Now he just drinks it like a man who's given up on joy."
"That tracks."
"Don't tell him I said that."
The radio behind him was turned up loud enough that I'd had to raise my voice twice already, some Motown song rolling out warm and scratchy from a speaker held together with electrical tape. Fedya caught me listening and turned it up another notch, which I hadn't thought possible.
"You know this one?"
"No."
He looked genuinely wounded. "Temptations. 1965. This is a crime, what you just told me."
"I know some Motown."
"Name one."
"'My Girl.'"
"Everybody knows 'My Girl.' That's like saying you know food because you've had bread." He pointed the wrench at me like a professor making a point. "You live here now. There will be a curriculum."
"I look forward to my education."
"You should. I'm an excellent teacher. Ask anybody.
" He glanced over his shoulder toward the restoration bay, where Zoya was standing with a clipboard and an expression that suggested she was auditing the entire garage by sight alone.
"Ask her. She'll call me insufferable, then tell you I'm right anyway. "
Zoya didn't look up from the clipboard. "You're insufferable."
"See."
"I didn't say the other part."
Fedya grinned at me like this was a long-running bit they both enjoyed, and maybe it was.
I liked him immediately, in a way that surprised me a little.
I hadn't expected to like anyone this fast. I'd been ready to manage people instead, same as I'd managed clients and opposing counsel and my father's associates for years, reading them for what they wanted before they said it.
Fedya didn't seem to want anything from me except someone to argue about music with, and there was something almost restful in that.
Zoya finally looked up, and her eyes went over me the way an inspector's eyes go over a car before a sale, thorough and unhurried and giving away nothing.
"You slept," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Some."
"Good. That's just the new-bed feeling talking.
It fades." She made a small mark on her clipboard that had nothing to do with anything I'd said, as far as I could tell, and I filed that away without understanding it.
"The garage opens at six. If you hear the bay doors, that's normal.
If you hear shouting, that's also normal, but let me know which kind. "
"There's more than one kind?"
"There's the kind where someone dropped something on their foot, and the kind where someone's about to get fired." She said it without inflection, like she was reading off inventory. "You'll learn to tell them apart."
Fedya snorted into his coffee. Zoya checked her phone, glanced toward the office where I knew, though I couldn't see him, that Damian was somewhere on a call, and murmured something under her breath that sounded like a number.
I caught the shape of it more than the sound, low enough that I wasn't sure I'd heard right, and when I looked at her she was already back to the clipboard like nothing had happened.
"Sorry," I said. "What was that?"
"Nothing. Talking to myself." She said it so evenly that I let it go, tucking it next to the sleep comment, a small strange habit that probably had something to do with scheduling or shipments or one of the hundred logistics I hadn't learned yet.
I decided I'd figure out the pattern eventually.
Everyone at The Yard seemed to run on a private frequency I hadn't tuned into.
That was when Bear found me, or rather when Bear's dog found me, a blur of gray and white fur that came skidding across the concrete floor with one ear standing straight up and the other missing entirely, stub and all, like it had simply never grown one.
"That's Piston," Bear said, following at a pace that seemed almost apologetic for a man his size. "He doesn't usually do that."
"Do what?"
"He runs at people. He's shy." Piston was, at that moment, attempting to climb directly into my lap while I was still standing, which struck me as a strange definition of shy. "Sorry. He's not like this most days."
"He's fine. I like him already."
"He bit a guy once. Delivery guy. He wouldn't stop barking at him for a week after."
"I'll add that to his resume."
"He likes you, though. I can tell." Bear said this with the solemnity of a man delivering important news, and crouched down to scratch behind Piston's remaining ear, which made the dog's whole back half wag independently of the front half. "He usually takes a while to warm up."
I sat down on an overturned crate mostly because Piston seemed determined to make it happen one way or another, and the second I did he circled twice and dropped into my lap like he'd been assigned there by some higher authority, forty pounds of dog settling in like he intended to stay through the winter.
"I think he's decided," I said.
"Yeah." Bear looked pleased in a way that made his whole face change, boyish under all that size. "He does that. Once he decides, that's it. You're stuck with him now."
"I don't mind."
"Everybody says that at first."
Piston, for his part, sighed the deep and total sigh of a creature whose work in life is done, and closed his one good eye, and I found I genuinely didn't mind at all. I had a soft spot for things that showed up ragged and decided to stay anyway. I always had.
Finding food in that kitchen turned out to be its own kind of education.
I'd gone up to the loft looking for something to eat before I'd fully understood the internal logic of the place.
As far as I could tell, whoever had stocked those cabinets had organized them by a system entirely unrelated to eating.
The drawer beside the stove held silverware on one side and, on the other, a neat row of socket wrenches in ascending size.
The cabinet at eye level had three mismatched coffee mugs, a stack of paper plates, and what appeared to be a spare car battery.
"Why is there a battery in here?"
Fedya, who had trailed up after me under the pretense of showing me where things were and was doing an admirable job of showing me nothing, peered into the cabinet like he was seeing it for the first time himself.
"Huh."
"That's not an explanation."
"It's a good place for it. Cool, dry. Batteries like that."
"It's next to the cereal."
"Cereal likes it too, probably."
I pulled open another drawer and found exactly one fork, four screwdrivers, and a coil of wire. The drawer beneath that had actual food in it, a box of crackers and a jar of something that might have once been jam, shoved next to a tin of what I was fairly sure was engine degreaser.
"Please tell me that's labeled correctly."
Fedya leaned over my shoulder to look. "That one, yes. That one's the real thing." He pointed at a second, nearly identical tin further back. "That one is not food."
"How am I supposed to know the difference?"
"Common sense."
"Nothing about a car battery next to the cereal qualifies as sense of any kind."
He laughed at that, delighted, and called down the stairwell for Bear, who arrived a moment later looking like he'd been summoned for an emergency and was relieved to find it wasn't one.
"She's trying to find the food," Fedya told him, like this was a spectator sport.
"Oh." Bear surveyed the kitchen with the expression of a man realizing, for the first time in his life, that it might look strange to an outsider. "Yeah. Damian doesn't cook much. It sort of became storage."
"For car parts."
"For whatever needed somewhere to go." He opened a cabinet with visible pride, like he was unveiling something significant, and there it was: a single unopened box of pasta, sitting alone on an otherwise empty shelf. "See. We have pasta."
"One box."
"It's a start."
Between the two of them I eventually assembled something that could pass for a meal: crackers, the jam that was actually jam, and a fork, pulled from a drawer Fedya swore had never once held anything but forks.
I made a mental note, quiet and without any real heat behind it, that I was going to reorganize that kitchen the first free hour I had, and that no one currently living in this loft was going to be consulted about it.
On my way back down through the garage with my plate, I passed the corner bay again, the one with the padlocked steel door set into concrete that didn't match the rest of the building's bones.
I'd noticed it the first day, and Damian had told me, flatly, not to open it, no more explanation offered than that, the same way he told me most things, direct and final and closed at the end like a door in itself.
I slowed a little as I passed it this time, more curious than uneasy, the kind of curiosity that comes from simple proximity rather than suspicion.
I thought about the lock, and the plain steel, and the fact that nobody in the garage so much as glanced at it as they worked.
I decided, again, not to ask. It wasn't because I wasn't curious. I was. But there was something in choosing not to push that felt like its own private gift, small and quiet, the sort of thing that might matter more later than any answer would matter now. I kept walking.
Katya arrived that afternoon with a box of pastries and the energy of a woman who had been saving up questions for a week and intended to spend all of them at once.
"Okay," she said, dropping onto the couch in my new living room like she owned it, "start from the beginning, and don't leave anything out, and I brought the good ones from Astoria so you owe me total honesty."
"That's blackmail."
"That's currency. Talk."
I told her some of it, the parts that were mine to tell, the loft and Fedya's coffee and the kitchen full of engine parts, and she laughed so hard at the battery in the cereal cabinet that she nearly choked on a croissant.
"And the husband?" she said, once she'd recovered. "How is he? Is he still doing the thing where he talks like every sentence costs him money?"
"He is."
"Does it drive you insane?"
"Less than I thought it would."
"That was a deposition answer. Give me a real one."
I thought about it, actually thought, instead of reaching for something smooth to hand her.
"He's not what I expected," I said finally.
"Before the wedding, I mean. I'd read the files on him.
Everyone had a version of him, all the same shape, cold, dangerous, closed.
And some of that's true. But it's not the whole picture.
There's more underneath it than any of that prepared me for. "
Katya studied me over her coffee, uncharacteristically quiet for a second. "That sounds like something," she said. "I'm not sure what yet. But it's something."
"It's early."
"If you say so." She didn't push, which for Katya was its own kind of restraint, and reached instead for another pastry, already moving on to asking whether Zoya was as terrifying as she looked and whether the giant one, Bear, had a girlfriend, because she had opinions about that too.
After she left, once the loft had gone quiet again, I carried the one photograph I'd brought from my father's house into the bedroom that was now, on paper and increasingly in fact, mine.
It was a small frame, plain silver, a little tarnished at one corner, and it still carried, faintly, the ghost of lily of the valley, the perfume my mother had worn every day of my childhood until the day she hadn't worn anything at all anymore.
I'd kept the bottle for years after and let it run dry rather than use the last of it, and somewhere in the frame's velvet backing, enough of that scent had settled that it never quite left.
I found a nail already in the wall, left by whoever had lived there before Damian, and I hung her there, in the one blank stretch of wall across from the window, where the afternoon light would reach her by early evening.
I stepped back to look. My mother, younger in the photograph than I was now, laughing at something outside the frame, some joke I'd never know the punchline to.
The room around her looked less like a place I'd been assigned to and more, for one unguarded moment, like somewhere I might actually come to live.