16. Derek
DEREK
The square at dawn belonged to nobody but the two of us and a hundred yards of extension cord, frost still thick enough on the grass to crunch under my boots, breath fogging out in front of me every time I bent to check a connection.
The generator sat squat and gray behind the gazebo, humming low and steady under a tarp somebody had rigged the night before, and past it the big spruce stood wrapped in dark strings of lights waiting for a switch to turn them gold.
Twelve hours from now this square would hold the whole town shoulder to shoulder for the tree lighting.
Right now it held me, a clipboard, and Leah Bennett kneeling by a junction box with her hair escaping its knot and a headlamp strapped crooked over one ear.
"Tell me the fire lane's clear," she said, not looking up.
"Fire lane's clear. I walked it twice."
"You walked it twice before I even got here."
"I walked it a third time after you got here. You were fifteen minutes early. I didn't want to be outpaced by a woman holding a thermos."
"You're never outpaced. You're just competitive about things nobody asked you to be competitive about.
" She sat back on her heels and squinted up at the tree, counting strings under her breath.
"Two hundred and forty bulbs. If even one string's dead we're doing this in the dark with a town full of children watching. "
"Nothing's dead. I checked them last night."
"You checked them last night and now you're checking them again this morning, which tells me you don't actually trust your own work."
"I trust it fine. I like redundancy."
"You like control. There's a difference, and you know it, because you told me that difference yourself, back when you were explaining fire code to me like I was a golden retriever."
"I've never once compared you to a golden retriever."
"You implied it heavily."
I didn't answer that, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and mostly because the sight of her crouched in the frost with a headlamp askew and an entire festival's worth of confidence in her voice was doing something to my morning that had nothing to do with the temperature.
We worked the perimeter together after that, me calling out load numbers, her cross-checking them against a laminated sheet she'd made herself, the two of us falling into the same rhythm we'd built over six weeks without either of us ever agreeing out loud to build it.
She handed me tools before I asked for them half the time.
I caught the ladder before it slid on the frozen grass without her having to say anything.
It shouldn't have felt as easy as it did, working a freezing town square before sunrise with a woman who argued with me about everything and somehow never once actually slowed me down.
The generator died at ten after eight.
It didn't die dramatically. It simply stopped, mid-hum, the drone cutting to nothing so fast the silence afterward felt louder than the noise had been. Every string of lights on the tree went dark at once.
"That's not good," Leah said, already moving toward it.
"That's not good," I agreed, already there ahead of her, pulling the tarp back off a machine old enough that its serial plate had gone soft and unreadable with rust. "This thing's forty years old. It's outlived three mayors and two of my predecessors."
"Well, it's about to outlive the tree lighting too, unless we do something about it in the next couple hours."
I popped the housing and crouched by the engine, running my hands over the fuel line, the plug, the choke, doing the same mental checklist I ran on any engine that quit without warning.
Cold air had a way of doing exactly this to old machines, seizing something that would have limped along fine in warmer weather, and I was already narrowing down the likely culprits before Leah had finished pulling her gloves back on.
"Talk to me," she said, crouching beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched. "What are we looking at?"
"Could be the plug. Could be the fuel line's gummed up from sitting all year. Could be the carburetor's just done, in which case we've got a problem no amount of stubbornness fixes before nine o'clock."
"We are not telling four hundred people the tree lighting's canceled because a generator from the Nixon administration gave up."
"I didn't say we were telling anyone anything. I said it's a possibility."
"Take the possibility back."
"It's not up to me. It's up to the generator."
She glared at the machine like it had personally wronged her, which, given the morning we were having, it more or less had. I pulled the spark plug and held it up to the gray morning light, and the tip came back fouled and black, coated thick enough that I could have written my name in the residue.
"There it is. Fouled plug." I set it down on the tarp and reached for the toolbox at my knee. "Might not be the only problem, but it's a problem, and it's the one I can fix fastest."
"Tell me what you need."
"Hand me the three-eighths."
She dug through the toolbox, came up with a socket, and pressed it into my palm without hesitating.
"No. The other one."
"There's only one three-eighths in here, Derek."
"Then it's the wrong one. Try the smaller box. Sarge keeps a spare set in the truck for exactly this kind of morning."
She was gone and back in under a minute, breath coming fast, cheeks gone red from the cold and the jog, and this time the socket she handed me fit clean onto the bolt on the first try.
"You could have just said thank you," she said, watching me work.
"Thank you."
"That was delayed enough to not count."
"I was busy. Gratitude has a queue."
She laughed, short and surprised, and crouched lower to shine her headlamp directly into the engine housing so I could see what I was doing, holding it steady without being asked, the beam catching every curl of breath between us in the cold.
I worked the old plug loose, wire-brushed it clean enough to be useful again, and reached for the spare from the toolbox as a backup in case the first one didn't hold.
"While you're in there," Leah said, "I'm going to check the fuel line, because if it's gummed up too, a clean plug isn't going to save us."
"You know how to check a fuel line?"
"I know how to Google a fuel line at six this morning after I heard the forecast call for a hard freeze. I've been planning for this generator to die since the forecast came in."
"You knew it might die and you didn't tell me?"
"I told you it was old. You said, and I quote, it's outlived three mayors, like that was reassuring instead of a warning label."
She had a point, which I chose not to give her the satisfaction of hearing out loud, and instead handed her a rag and pointed her toward the fuel line while I finished seating the new plug.
Her hands were bare within a minute, gloves shoved into her pocket because apparently they didn't allow enough precision for whatever she was doing.
I watched her work the line loose with the same stubborn focus she brought to a spreadsheet or a vendor dispute, unbothered by grease, cold, or the fact that half the town's holiday tradition rode on both our freezing hands.
"This is either going to work," she said, not looking up, "or end my career in this town in one afternoon."
"It's not going to end your career."
"You don't know that."
"I know that if it doesn't work, I'll tell everyone it was my fault. I outrank you on this particular disaster."
She looked up at that, something startled and warm crossing her face before she caught it and turned it back into a smirk. "That's the nicest thing you've said to me all week."
"Low bar."
"Still counts."
We worked in silence for a few minutes after that, the kind that didn't need filling.
Both of us were elbow deep in a machine older than either of our careers, breath fogging in the cold.
My fingers had gone numb, and she'd started flexing her hand every few seconds to keep the blood moving.
I reseated the plug, primed the choke, and looked at her.
"Ready?"
"Please, before I lose another finger."
I pulled the cord.
It caught on the second try, sputtering, coughing, and then catching for real, the old engine settling into a rough, steady hum that climbed smoother with every second it ran, and up on the tree every string of lights flickered once and came back on, gold and warm against a flat gray morning sky.
Leah made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a shout and threw both arms up like she'd just won something at the county fair, and before I'd fully decided to do it, I was laughing too, low and real, the kind that still caught me off guard every time it showed up around her.
"We did that," she said, spinning to face me, cheeks bright red, grease smudged across one knuckle. "We actually did that."
"You did the fuel line. I did the plug."
"We're not doing the thing where you refuse to take credit for anything. Not today. Today we fixed a forty-year-old generator with our bare hands in freezing weather, and I want at least thirty seconds of unearned pride before reality sets back in."
"Fine. Thirty seconds. We're excellent."
"We're extremely excellent."
I checked my watch out of habit, and something in my chest loosened when I saw the time.
Twenty minutes to spare before the crew arrived to start the final sound check, twenty minutes we hadn't had ten minutes ago, and the tree stood behind us glowing steady and gold like it had never once considered failing us.
I don't know exactly what made me say it. Maybe it was the twenty minutes, or the cold, or the way she was still grinning at the tree like she'd personally strung every light on it herself. Whatever it was, the words were out of my mouth before I'd run them past anything resembling good judgment.
"You want to get cocoa. After."
She turned, eyebrows up, waiting, and I heard just how badly that had come out, no shape to it at all, just four words dropped on the ground between us like a tool I'd fumbled.
"Not a date," I added, which somehow made it worse instead of better.
"Not a date," she repeated, like she was testing the words for weight.
"Obviously not. We just fixed a generator together. People get cocoa after things like that. It's practically procedure."
"Is it?"
"I don't have the paperwork on me, but I'm confident it's procedure somewhere."
She studied me for a long moment, grease on her hands, headlamp still crooked, a smile building slow at the corner of her mouth that she wasn't bothering to hide even a little.
I stood there in the cold with grease under my nails and my own pulse doing something entirely unprofessional, and some part of me that I generally kept on a short leash was hoping harder than I wanted to admit that she'd say yes.
"Okay," she said. "Cocoa. After."
"Good."
"Not a date."
"Right."
"Just to be clear."
"Crystal clear."
She gathered the toolbox and rags and started back across the square toward the gazebo. I stood there a second longer than I needed to, watching her go, wiping grease off my hands like the motion might settle whatever wasn't settling in my chest.
"It's not a date," I said again, mostly to myself, mostly to see if it sounded any truer the second time.
"Obviously not," Leah called back over her shoulder, already smiling the whole walk back to the square, and I followed her across the frozen grass with the tree glowing gold behind us both, telling myself the whole way that I believed it.