Page 32 of Every Almost

Charlie fixedthe timing chain that afternoon while Frank sat in a lawn chair by the garage door and watched her work. Katiebuzzed around Charlie, fetching tools (usually the wrong ones) and bringing the glass of lemonade Helen had left out to and from Charlie when she asked. He noticed the way Charlie would ask for a tool, take whatever Katie provided to her, thank her or ruffle her hair or say 'close enough,' then ask for that lemonade glass, and switch out the wrong tool for the right one while Katie was busy. He also noticed, and suspected he wasn't supposed to, that Charlie muttered at the Cutlass the whole time she worked.Easy now. Yeah, I see you. You've been carrying this one a while, haven't you.Like the car was an old horse who'd thrown a shoe instead of a car with a dying timing chain.

Frank didn't hover over them and didn't offer advice. He just sat there with his own lemonade while Charlie and her little sister took apart the Cutlass's engine with the quiet authority of someone who'd been doing this all her life, no matter how short it had been so far. As time passed in the afternoon, he noticed that, despite his initial precautions, he could tell the Wickett girl was doing a bang-up job.

Something in his face changed.

Neither Charlie nor Katie saw it. Charlie was underneath the car doing her work and Katie was standing over the engine on her tiptoes, trying to see in to witness what Charlie was fixing.

But Helen, walking out the kitchen doorway with a plate of cookies to add to the lemonade, saw it clearly.

Frank had found a purpose. Or, perhaps, that purpose had foundhim.

After the Cutlass,Charlie and Katie started coming by the Beckmans' home often. Close to it. They'd walk past the house on their way home from school and Frank would be in thegarage, tinkering around on something small. He'd wave them both over, asking "Hey, got a minute, you two?"

"What's going on, Mr. Beckman?" Charlie would always ask.

"I think I need the dynamic duo's help on this one." He always asked it like he was the one who needed the favor. The girls never said no.

Charlie was often there before Frank expected her. He noticed, and it became one of his favorite things about her. "Early is on time and on time is late," he told her one afternoon when she showed up ten minutes before he'd even opened the garage. "Remember that, kiddo. It'll serve you well."

Charlie would drop her backpack on the step next to the lawn chair, Katie following suit, and Frank would hand them a coffee can full of bolts that needed sorting, or a hinge that had come loose on the screen door, or the carburetor from his lawn tractor that was running rough. Small jobs. Things he could have done himself in ten minutes. But Frank wasn't interested in the jobs. He was interested in watching Charlie's hands, and in talking to the girls while Charlie worked.

Frank Beckman had spent forty years telling stories about engines to a wife who loved those stories and loved him. But he hadn’t met someone since his days on a Navy ship who could understand the engineering language underneath the way Charlie did.

Frank's stories started after the first day with the Cutlass.

"The Big E," he called it, the first time he mentioned his career on a naval carrier ship. "The USS Enterprise CV-6 Naval Air Carrier. Yorktown class. The most decorated warship in the history of the United States Navy."

Charlie's hands went still on the lawn tractor and she looked up at Frank. "You served on a warship?"

"I served onthewarship." Frank took a sip of his lemonade. "Aviation Machinist's Mate. I kept the planes flying."

"Airplanes!" Katie shrieked.

"That's right, boss."

"What kind of planes?" Charlie asked.

And Frank told her. Not all at once, over time, in the garage while Charlie worked and Frank sat in his lawn chair with his lemonade. He told the girls about the SBD Dauntless dive bombers that won the Battle of Midway. About the Grumman Wildcats, stubby and mean, and the TBF Avengers heavy with torpedoes. He told them about the Hellcats that came later on in the war and swept the sky clean.

Frank talked about the carrier itself, telling them about the hangar deck, the vast space below the flight deck where he worked and the aircraft were maintained and repaired and armed while the fights in the Pacific Ocean raged on. He told them about what it was like to work through the night with nothing but a wrench and a flashlight and the knowledge that if you got it wrong, a pilot had a higher chance of not coming back. He told them about the sounds the ship made in rough seas, the way the hull groaned like a living thing, growling and churning beneath him while he slept in his bunk. And how you learned to sleep through sounds like that, how to sleep through anything except the one sound that meant trouble.

Charlie and Katie always listened to Frank completely, with their whole ears while Charlie's hands went still on whatever she was working on. Charlie would ask questions that surprised him. Not "were you scared" or "did you see anyone die," the questions adults usually asked. She would ask about the engines of the planes. About the fuel systems and how you keep a radial running in salt air with limited parts and no dry dock for a thousand miles. Frank answered every one, and each answer opened three more questions. He watched as it became evident that Charlie was already, without her knowing it, building toward something much bigger than lawn tractors.

Eventually, Katie got tired of stories about airplanes and engines and sea sickness. She would always be Charlie's partner but, Katie needed to find something else to talk about, something else to work on besides things that got her dirty.

"Why don't you go see what Mrs. Beckman is up to?" Frank once prompted Katie when he saw her eyes going crossed at his and Charlie's tech-speak. "Maybe she needs help with a batch of cookies." Frank winked at Katie, and Katie ran from the garage so fast, you'd think she give anything for a taste of Helen's special chocolate chip cookies.

Helen Beckman's kitchen had a small yellow table with four chairs, yellow curtains to match hanging over the window above the sink, and a cookie jar shaped like a rooster that was never empty. Katie claimed the chair closest to the window on her first visit and never sat anywhere else. Helen didn't assign it but then again, she didn't need to. She just noticed where Katie sat and made sure there was always a glass of milk waiting there every time.

Helen did tell stories too, but not engine stories, to Katie's relief. Helen told people stories. She'd been a nurse in the Navy Nurse Corps at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, just outside Chicago, during the war. She told Katie about the boys who came through basic training, eighteen years old and terrified and trying not to show it. She told her about the ones who came back from the Pacific with stories of their own that they'd share with her while she treated their wounds. And she told Katie about how she learned to hold someone's hand without flinching, and about the letters she wrote to families when the news was bad, and about the morning a boy no older than nineteen asked her to read him a letter from his mother because his hands were shaking too hard to hold the paper.

Katie listened to Helen the way she listened to Charlie. Without needing to understand every word because she trustedthe person saying them. She'd sit at that yellow table with cookie crumbs on her sweater and a milk mustache on her upper lip, and Helen would regale her with tales of people and culture and histories that Katie believed were magical. She would nod along and occasionally ask a question so intrinsically precise that Helen would stop mid-sentence and gaze at this child with something close to wonder.

"Were you ever scared, Mrs. Beckman?"

"Every day, sweetheart."

"But you kept going?"