Page 18 of Every Almost

Charlie stood there for a long time. She watched the baby's face and the baby's fingers and the rise and fall of the blanket. She barely moved, not speaking, while the world outside the little bubble they'd created went on without them.

In a single moment, the baby opened its eyes and looked right at Charlie. Charlie gazed back at this beautiful child and saw so many things she couldn't identify, but she knew they were important. The grip on her finger never ceased, and Charlie didn't let go. Before long, there was only one thing Charlie could think to do.

"Hi," she said, whispering quietly so only she and the baby could hear her words. It felt like the right thing to say at the time.

When a hand finally touched her shoulder and guided her gently away, she went. But her pinky trailed behind as long as it could, keeping contact with that little baby. Her hand was warm for the rest of the day. Throughout the day, she kept looking at her finger, turning it over, studying the place where the grip had held her. It felt as if something had been transferred, a transaction between two people who didn't know it would become a lifeline. She'd been handed a small, invisible power she didn't yet know how to name. But she knew, with the certainty that only six-year-olds possess, she would spend the rest of her life carrying.

Her parents named the baby Katherine. Everyone would call her Katie.

But Charlie would call her Kit.

Charlie Wickett was a fixer,but in a way that made her special. In fact, she fixed her first machine at ten years old, thank youvery much. But the one thing people always got wrong about her was thinkingthatwas the interesting part.

The toaster had been burning bread on one side for as long as anyone in the Wickett house could remember. Her father, Ed, scraped off the black and ate it. Her mother, Diane, threw away the bad slice and toasted another. Katie thought the burnt pieces were great for rubbing across the table in her high chair like crayons, creating some spectacular pieces of art in Charlie's eyes on many occasions. Diane didn't agree.

But the burning bread bothered Charlie. One Saturday morning, she sat on the kitchen floor with a butter knife and her mother's sewing scissors, and opened it up. Once inside, she found the problem. A crumb tray so packed with char it had warped the heating element off-center by a quarter inch.Oh, buddy,she thought at the toaster.No wonder.She bent the element back, cleaned out the tray, which was, she had to admit, legitimately disgusting, and put the whole thing back together, slipping it into its spot before anyone knew what she'd done.

The toast came out even the next morning. Ed looked at it for a long time, then at Diane, then at the toast again.

"Did you buy a new toaster?" he asked.

"No," Diane said. "Why?"

"Nothing," Ed replied. "Nothing..."

Charlie, who was already sitting at the table eating cereal, said nothing. She was more concerned with the family's lawnmower, which had been pulling left all spring, and adding it to her list of things to fix.

What people got wrong was this that they heard "fixed a toaster at ten years old" and thought the story was about how smart she was. It wasn't. Don't misunderstand though. Charliewassmart. But the real story here was that her entire family had been eating burnt toast, and Charlie was the only one who couldn't stand it. But not because of the taste. For Charlie, it wasbecause something in her world was broken, and broken things could be fixed. The distance between those two facts was a gap Charlie would never leave alone.

After the toaster came the lawnmower, which she figured out had been pulling left because the blade was unbalanced. She'd heard it from the driveway when the boy down the street mowed their lawns on Saturdays. One Saturday, she waited until he was done and tipped the mower onto its side.Alright,she told it,let's fix your limp.Ten minutes of patience and a file, and the blade ran true. Later that week when the boy came to collect payment, he made sure to thank Ed.

"The mower sure works great now, Mr. Wickett!" The boy called out as he ran down the path to the sidewalk to continue on his way. Ed looked at the mower over by the garbage cans, scratched his chin, and walked away confused.

Then came the vacuum (a loose drive belt, barely worth the ten minutes), the blender (a loose blade assembly Charlie found oddly charming, considering it had been flirting with catastrophe for months), and the clock radio in her parents' bedroom that lost two minutes every week.

Nobody had noticed the clock until Charlie mentioned it was slow at dinner one night. Diane had waved her off and said, "It's fine, Charlotte." At her mother's dismissal, Charlie looked down at her plate. Katie, across the table, looked at Charlie and then at Diane, her small face tightening in annoyance in a way that nobody else noticed.

Charlie fixed the radio anyway, because it wasn't fine. It was off by two minutes and that meant something was dying inside it. That night, she found the capacitor was bleeding charge. She replaced it with one from a broken radio she'd found in the neighbor's trash.

But it was Ed's electric drill that got her in trouble. It had been overheating since he bought it, but Ed was adamant abouthow he never wanted the girls to touch his tools. One night, though, he came into the garage to grab a screwdriver and found his eleven-year-old daughter sitting cross-legged on the concrete with the drill in fourteen pieces around her. The sound that man made was not a word so much as a strangled attempt at one. Charlie looked up at him with the motor housing in her lap and said, "The brushes are worn down unevenly. That's why it overheats. I can fix it, but I need a flat-head screwdriver, not a Phillips." Ed just stared at his daughter. "Oh, and you should probably stop buying tools from the bargain bin at Sears."

Ed grounded her for a week.

But the drill stopped overheating, and Ed never needed to ask why.

That was the way of Charlie's life growing up in the Wickett house. She could fix a toaster but her father would ask if someone bought a new one. She could fix a drill but get grounded for touching it. She could fix a clock radio at midnight but her mother would never know, because her mother said it was fine, and in the Wickett house, 'fine' was the end of every conversation.

She could fix almost anything under that roof. She just couldn't make anyone notice.

Katie,however, was the exception. Katie was always the exception.

Six years younger and built from entirely different clay, Katie had been following Charlie into the garage since she could walk. She'd sit on the cold concrete with her legs crossed and her chin on her fists. She'd watch Charlie's hands disappear into whatever machine had found its way into the garage that weekwith the absolute focus of a child who didn't understand a single thing she was seeing and trusted it completely anyway.

Because it was Charlie who was doing it.

Charlie included Katie every time. "Hand me the Phillips head," she'd say, and Katie would study the tool chest with intense concentration, then hand her a pair of pliers, or a socket wrench, or once, a pencil.

"Close enough," Charlie told her with a grin when Katie handed over the pencil, and Katie had smiled so wide that Charlie made it a permanent policy.