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“Called it,” I said, not quite under mine.

We got the ramp set. This time there was an audience, which changed a lift. It added a variable, a whole sidewalk of people who loved us and would absolutely get underfoot trying to help in ways that only made it worse.

Finn tried to spot us. I gave his scrawny ass one dark look. He shoved his hands back in his pockets. Jacks offered to hold something, so I let him keep the balloons, which was the safest possible job and made him visibly happy. Benji narrated.

“Easy,” Benji called. “Easy. She’s precious cargo. Mind her corners. Support her base. There’s a lot of woman there—”

“Benji,” Mark grunted.

“I’m being supportive, but not as much as Dante. He’s like an ice machine bra, lift and separate. Doesn’t get more supportive than that.”

Finn snorted.

Mark took the top, while I took the base, same as before. We edged her down the ramp an inch at a time. I watched Mark’s feet the same as I had at the warehouse. I called the lip before it came. He trusted it the same, stepping on my word without once looking down. I thought, We’ve done this twice now, and both times it went like we’d done it a hundred.

I didn’t examine that thought any more than he’d examined the six or seven I’d watched cross his face all afternoon. We were, the two of us, becoming a matched set of men not examining things.

It was efficient.

It was also, I was beginning to suspect, a conundrum I was handing to some later version of myself, the way you might leave a note on a machine that says, “DO NOT RUN. FIX FIRST,” and then run it anyway.

Somehow, we got the machine through the door, into the kitchen, and into the gap where the old one had lived. Rod hovered the entire way with his hands half raised, ready to catch six hundred pounds of steel if we so much as tilted her, which would’ve accomplished nothing except adding Rod to the casualty list.

Rod’s outstretched arms were, I later understood, not really about physics. They were about presence. He needed to be near her.

Mark leveled her, then I plugged her in. The little screen woke and glowed and began its parade of cube profiles: sphere, then diamond, then nugget scrolling past.

But Rod didn’t rush in. He approached the machine the way one might approach a wild dog. He stopped a full arm’s length short. He lowered himself slightly, made himself smaller, less looming, and extended one hand, slow, palm down, fingers loose. He let his hand hover in the air near her steel flank without touching, waiting, giving her the moment.

Then, gently, with the back of two fingers, he grazed her side.

It was a caress.

He stroked her once, slowly, from the seam of the door up toward the vent, murmuring something too low to catch. Then he went still and simply rested his palm flat against her side and closed his eyes.

The kitchen had gone completely silent.

“Rod,” Finn said carefully from the doorway, one hand covering his mouth, probably smothering more laughter. “What are you doing?”

Rod didn’t open his eyes or move or anything. He simply whispered, “Letting her get to know me.”

“She’s . . . an ice machine,” Finn managed before clamping his hand more firmly over his lips.

“She doesn’t know that yet,” Rod said with the patience of a man explaining something obvious to a child. “She doesn’t know me or this kitchen. She does not know heat off the line, sound of the fryer, none of it. You do not walk up and push buttons on a new machine. That is how you get machine that hates you.” He stroked her flank again, slow. “Sir Reginald and me, first week, I didn’t ask him for one thing. I let him run. I let him settle. I put hand on him every morning so he knew my touch. Seven years—” He caught himself. “Seven years, we never had bad day, because I let him know me first.”

“That’s not—” Finn started, then stopped, visibly deciding the hill wasn’t worth the fight. “You know what, sure, whatever, fondle the ice maker, whatever floats your—”

“I have to court her, Finnigan,” Rod said, utterly unbothered, opening his eyes now. “Machines are like people, like animals. Rush them, crowd them, make demands before you’ve earned it, they close up. They break down on Saturday out of spite. Show them respect, show them tenderness”—he laid his other hand on her, both palms flat now, communing—“they give everything, every service, every rush. They bleed for you.” He looked back at the machine with wet eyes. “She will bleed for me, Finn.”

“She’s going to make ice, too, right?” Jacks asked, his balloons bobbing against the ceiling behind him.

“Si, Jacks. Si,” Rod whispered.

“It’s really not the same thing,” Finn said, shaking his head.

Benji, beside me, had both hands pressed over his mouth, less because he was laughing, though he was, than because he’d been struck silent by the sheer devotion of it, a professional chef down on one knee, courting an appliance, letting it get to know his hand.

I stood in my corner and watched Mark watch Rod. I watched Mark’s face do the thing it did, the gruffness cracking just enough to let fondness through, because this was his kitchen and his chef and his ridiculous, beautiful family. I understood, standing there, that Mark loved Rod exactly the way Rod loved that machine, slow and patient, letting people take his scent, putting a hand on the thing every morning so it knew his touch. However long it took, there were no bad days, because he’d let them know him first.