I looked down at my hands and ran through all of the excuses I could think of as to why I should say no to him right now — my nerves, not knowing all that much about him, the prospect of him meeting Liam. But, when I looked back up, meeting his eyes once again, all of that fell away.
“Yes,” I said simply. And then I was even bolder and gave him my number, “So you can tell me what the plan is,” I told him. He gave me a deep smile, deeper than I’d ever seen on him, before turning and heading back to his house.
8
Caleb
The morning of our first official date, the shop was loud the way I liked it — every bay full, somebody’s country station turned up past what the speaker could carry, Bear running a flap disc down a fender three feet off my elbow and singing the wrong words to it. I had the hood down on the Halvorsen tank, laying the candy red back into the edge of the artwork, and for an hour I was nothing but the gun and the hiss of it and the color bleeding through right. It was one of those easy days, everyone in the shop cracking jokes, getting into the flow of the work.
The good of the morning held until a little before noon.
I’d moved off the tank and onto a wheel build — lacing spokes, which leaves your ears with nothing to do. That was how I heard my father take the call.
He took most of his calls loud. Forty years around men half-deaf from engines had given him a phone voice you could land a plane on, and for the first stretch this was that voice — easy, graveled, a man agreeing to look at somebody’s basket-case Shovelhead as a favor he’d grumble about and do anyway.
Then it changed.
“When.” Not a question. Flat, and lower than the voice he’d answered with.
I had a spoke half-threaded and I didn’t finish it.
“He say what he wants.” A pause, the country station filling it. “No. No, you did right to call me.”
Through the office glass I watched his free hand come up off the desk and settle on the back of his neck. To anybody else in the building it was a tired man rubbing a tired neck at the end of a long call. I’d been watching that hand make that trip since I was ten, in the worst year the two of us ever stood in. It meant he was looking at a thing he didn’t want and working out how much of it to carry out the door.
He said something else, too low for me to catch and then he stood there a moment after the call had ended, phone still in his hand, eyes gone to the middle of nothing.
I put the spoke down and went to the office door.
“Everything okay, Pop?”
He came back from wherever he’d been, and the small good Saturday face he’d worn all week came on over the top of the other one, smooth as paint. “Fine. Old business.” He set the phone face-down on the desk. “Nothing for you to lose a wheel build over.”
I held the doorframe and looked at him a beat longer than the answer wanted me to. He looked back, easy, and didn’t give me the rest. He’s a better liar than most men because he doesn’t oversell it; he just shuts the door on the thing and stands in front of it.
I let him. For now. You don’t crowbar a closed man — not this one, not in his own shop, not on the strength of a feeling. He’d hand it over when he’d worked out how, or I’d come back at it when I had more than a hand on the back of a neck to go on.
He crossed to the cabinet by the window, took the bottle off the shelf and a glass, and poured himself two fingers of whiskeyat eleven in the morning. Knocked it back in one and set the glass down quiet. In my whole life I’d seen my father drink in this shop maybe twice, and both times a man we’d loved was already in the ground.
I filed the call, and the hand, and the glass in the place I kept things I wasn't ready to look at. Shut the drawer. Laced the next spoke.
I went home, showered the shop off, and opened the wardrobe.
I grabbed a black shirt and put it on, walking away before I could change my mind.
The reservation was already sitting in my phone.
Six-thirty.
The steakhouse out on the edge of town. Low light. Quiet booths. Good food.
Sophia had once told me the best part of a day off was ten minutes on her porch before the world started asking things from her.
The place felt right.
On the way to the kitchen I passed the bike.
The keys hung where they always did.
