“And so you’re restoring these cars. Driving them down from Boston and—”
“Not driving them down. They’re being brought down on semis. We don’t want them on the road.”
“Okay. So you’re bringing them down from Boston and working on them here.”
“Right.”
“Forget for a minute that there must be three hundred guys in Boston that could be doing it.”
He snorted. “Hardly. But yeah, it could be done in Boston. But she needed them off the estate there because of selling it, there’s room for them here and I can do the restoration basically twenty-four seven, so she can put the whole collection on the market.”
“She’s selling her father’s car collection too?”
He shrugged. “I think with Betsy married now, and Joey in Africa, she’s doing some downsizing.” He laughed. “Jesus, can you imagine a life where your downsizing is getting rid of a Boston estate, a car collection, and who knows what else, but keeping a place like the Chesney Hills house and a place on Cape Cod?”
“No,” I said, “I can’t imagine a life like that.”
He looked over at me. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
I waved his apology away. “Believe it or not, I don’t lament the fact that Betsy and Joey lived in a house like that—or several of them. It’s not the money that I envied, it was—” I stopped, realizing what I was revealing—that I envied their situation in any way. And to Stick of all people, who would no doubt needle me about it and use it to his advantage.
But he didn’t. He said nothing for the next fifteen minutes until we reached the town of Schoolport. Bribury was on the edge of town closest to Chesney. I happened to know that Stick and Lucas were from the other side of town. Literally from the wrong side of the tracks.
“Yeah, I know it wasn’t—isn’t—about the money for you, Jane. But a shitty home life is a little easier to take when you have your own wing of the house to hide out in.”
“True,” I conceded, though I would never know for sure. Still, it would have been nice to hide from Pandora and her periodic smothering.
But it did make me think about Stick’s home life. “You sound like maybe you could’ve used that private wing growing up, yourself.”
He shrugged, downshifting to take the corner onto the Bribury campus. “We’ve all got our shit to deal with. Joey Stratton is in Africa to escape his. So, yeah, maybe having a whole wing to hide in isn’t even enough.”
“And how’d you deal with your shit?”
He lovingly stroked Yvette’s steering wheel and I had a flash of his long, strong fingers stroking me that way. “Cars,” he said. “They were my salvation.”
“And your income.”
“That came later. I started working on cars when I was eight years old. Would just hang out at my old man’s shop, handing him tools and shit. Nudie calendar on the wall, the smell of oil, allowed to get as dirty as I wanted—I thought it was the greatest place in the world.”
“So why aren’t you still working there? Instead of…restoring cars?”
He tensed, his knuckles whitening on the gearshift. It was so close to my knee, I almost wanted to touch it, but I didn’t.
“Shop’s gone. Father’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sor—”
“Open the glove box. There’s a sticker in there for Lot H.”
He was obviously changing the subject. And as someone who often did the same when the subject of parents came up, I gave him a pass.
I pulled out the sticker, peeled the back off and stuck it on the inside of the windshield in my corner. I might have imagined it, but I thought Stick winced. I kind of felt the same way—I didn’t want any blemishes on Yvette.
“And don’t go putting stupid-ass bumper stickers all over her, either,” he said, thinking along the same lines as I was.
“I won’t,” I said, but not because he was telling me not to.
“She’s too gorgeous to be a billboard for your political or social commentary.”
