I had the bulb sitting in a drawer at the shop, along with everything I'd need to deal with the tire. The ignition I'd want to hear for myself before I guessed, but none of it would take long.
The problem wasn't the work, it was that I'd known the woman four days and was already making a list of things I wanted to fix for her.
I got into the truck before the thought could go any further, started the engine, and backed out of the drive.
The deciding could wait for the drive to work.
The roller door went up and the shop hit me all at once — heat, cutting oil, hot steel, somebody's bad country station bleeding through a speaker in the next bay.
A frame sat waiting on the jig and I got to work.
The hiss of shielding gas. The crackle of the arc. Molten metal laying itself into the joint.
I reached the end of the run and killed the torch.
When I lifted the hood, the radio was still playing. Somebody was laughing in the next bay.
And for the length of that weld, Sophia hadn't crossed my mind once.
My father was over by the office glass with the phone to his ear and his free hand moving slow and flat through the air, pressing the pleasure down before it could reach the rest of his face. Some magazine back east wanted the shop in a feature — the artists keeping American iron alive, that sort of thing — a call we’d have figured for somebody selling ad space five years back. He was easy on it. That was the thing I still wasn’t all the way used to, the ease on him: a man who’d carried what he’d carried, walking the floor of a clean shop with a magazine on the line and a smile he hadn’t owned in all the years I was gone.
“He’ll talk to you Thursday,” he said into the phone, and caught my eye through the glass, and tipped his head at the frame on the jig — that one — and I gave him a nod and went back to my bead.
Tuck was on the bench grinding a weld he’d already ground twice, which meant he was bored, which meant trouble was on its way. “You’ve welded that same six inches about four times now, Mad Dog.”
“Good steel. Worth getting right.”
“You’ve been somewhere else since you walked in.” He killed the grinder, pushed his goggles up, grinned at me with his whole face — the grin that’s never once come ahead of anything good. “Hell, you’ve been somewhere else since the move. Quiet. Quieter than your usual quiet.”
“Maybe I’m enjoying the peace.”
He laughed and went, and the shop ran on around me, loud the way it gets when everyone’s got work in their hands and nobody’s got a worry in their head. And somewhere in the middle of it, hood down and the arc lit, I thought about the woman across the road, and the way she’d stood at her own bin and told me don’t go to any trouble, honestly, I’ve got it — nearenough the same words she’d waved me off with in a trauma bay, like she kept a stack of them by the door and pressed one on every man who offered.
A woman who won’t be helped to your face.
All right, I thought. Then I won’t ask. I’d fix the thing and let her wonder who — and that way the helping wouldn’t cost her a thing. Not the thanks she didn’t want to hand over. Not the trouble she kept swearing she didn’t need.
Evening came down soft and the street went amber, and I was out in the garage with the door up and a wrench in my hand again, working — an excuse, mostly, to be outside where the air moved.
I had the old shop stool dragged out and a carburetor on the bench in front of me — a junk one off a parts bike that owed me nothing — and I was stripping it to clean and rebuild for no reason a sensible man could give. My hands knew the job without me in it. It let my head go quiet and my hands stay busy, which after the day I’d had, was about all I was asking of the evening.
So I had the wrench on a float-bowl screw and my weight on one hip and my back half to the road when I heard it.
The catch. Second turn of the key, that little hesitation, then the engine giving in and agreeing to live — only this time the sound was coming toward me, up the cul-de-sac, and I was on my feet at the bench with the wrench gone still in my hand before I’d decided to stand.
The pale sedan swung into the drive over the road.
It sat there ticking as the headlights died, and then her door opened and she got out, and everything in me that had spent the day pretending to read an empty slab of concrete went quiet and just looked.
She wasn’t in scrubs, she was in jeans that had gone soft with wear. A loose shirt with the sleeves pushed up, the same she’d carried out last night hung from one shoulder.
She reached back into the car for something and her hair fell forward. She pushed it away with the back of her wrist, grabbed a paper bag from the passenger seat, and shut the door with her hip.
I watched her stand there for a second, keys in one hand, bag in the other.
Then I looked away.
She went up the flagstones without ever glancing toward my side of the road, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside.
