“Most of the time I love you both,” I told him before getting serious. “And that, father of mine,” said Tad, grandly setting aside the headlight and starting on one of the bolts that held in the front clip, “is another lie.” “You are not my friends, I do not trust you with my secrets, so I will not tell you what is wrong,” I said, deadpan. Say instead, ‘You are not my friends, I do not trust you with my secrets, so I will not tell you what is wrong.’” When he started talking to me again, he said, “You should not lie to the fae, Mercy. Zee said something soft-voiced and calming in German, though I couldn’t catch exactly what the words were. Cars do that sometimes around the old iron-kissed fae. The little car bounced a bit, like a dog responding to its master. “Liar,” growled Zee’s voice from under a ’68 Beetle. He was one of the people I most trusted in the world. What he had retained was that scary competence that he’d had when I first walked into his father’s garage looking for a part to fix my Rabbit and found the elementary-aged Tad ably running the shop. He’d left for an Ivy League education but returned without his degree, and without the cheery optimism that had once been his default. I’d worked on cars with Tad for more than a decade, nearly half his life. I was pretty sure that if anything, I looked worse than he did. A smudge of black swooped across his right cheekbone and onto his ear like badly applied war paint.
It was also tipped here and there with the same grease that marked the overalls. Summer still held sway-if only just-so those overalls were stained with sweat, too.Įven his hair showed the effects of working in the heat, sticking out at odd angles. Like me, he wore grease-stained overalls. To speed up the repair, Tad was taking the left side and I was working on the right. I liked kids, but tired kids cooped up in my office space were another matter. I wished she had family here to watch them. She had, she told me, family in Missoula who could watch her children, but nobody but her alcoholic ex-husband to watch them in Portland, so she’d brought them with her. The task was made more urgent by the fact that the owner and her three children under five were occupying the office. We needed to get her back on the road so she could make her job interview tomorrow at eight a.m.
The owner had been driving from Portland to Missoula, Montana, when her car blew the radiator. It was a rush case on a couple of fronts. To do that, we had to take the whole front clip off. “ARE YOU OKAY, MERCY?” TAD ASKED ME AS HE DISCONNECTED the wiring harness from the headlight of the 2000 Jetta we were working on.
0 kommentar(er)
