Page 8 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mechanic

“Thank you. Not just for the bike.”

He doesn’t ask what I mean. He just nods once, slow, and looks away, and I walk out into the sunlight with a fixed e-bike and a feeling that’s less like damage and more like a window opening.

4

BECK

Ireorganize my socket set twice after she leaves.

Not because it needs it. Because my hands want something to do that isn’t thinking about the way Callie Wynn stood at my workbench and explained a blown MOSFET back to me like she was presenting a thesis.

I work on the Subaru. Change the oil on a snowmobile that doesn’t need it yet. Sweep the shop floor, which I never do on Thursdays. By five o’clock, I’ve run out of things to clean and have to admit I’m stalling, though I couldn’t say what I’m stalling for.

I lock up and walk to Lea’s.

I always go in the morning. Never the afternoon. Lea gives me a look when I walk in, the kind that says she’s noticed, and I ignore it and order my coffee and stand at the counter while she makes it.

“Twice in one day,” she says.

“Just coffee.”

“It’s always just coffee.” She sets the cup down. “And yet here you are at 5:15 looking like you forgot how to leave a building.”

I take the coffee and don’t answer, because Lea is exactly the kind of person who can read a room, and I don’t feel like being read.

The Trading Post courtyard is quiet at this hour. Most of the shops are closing up. The bookstore still has lights on. The candle place has its door propped open, and the whole courtyard smells like cedar and vanilla.

I should go home. My truck is in the other direction. My apartment is a ten-minute drive. There’s no reason to stand in a cobblestone courtyard drinking coffee I don’t need.

Callie comes out of the outfitter with a box of flyers under one arm and her keys in her teeth, trying to lock the front door one-handed. She’s losing the battle. The keys slip, she catches them against her chin, and the box starts to slide.

I’m across the courtyard before I decide to move.

“Here.” I take the box.

She looks up at me, keys dangling from her fingers, and there it is again. That smile. Wide open, no armor, like being happy to see someone is the easiest thing in the world and she can’t imagine why anyone would hide it.

“Beck. What are you doing here?”

“Coffee.”

“At five in the afternoon?”

“It’s 5:15.”

She laughs. I’m starting to understand that she laughs at things that aren’t funny, not because she’s being polite but because something in her sees humor everywhere, even in a mechanic standing in a courtyard holding her box and failing to explain why.

“Walk me to my car?” she says. “I’m around back.”

I should hand her the box and go home. That’s the correct move. The smart, uncomplicated, keep-your-life-simple move.

“Yeah,” I say.

We walk through the courtyard and around the back of the old stone buildings. The parking area is gravel, tucked between the Trading Post and the hillside. One car left—a sedan with a cracked windshield and a bumper sticker that reads I’d rather be skiing.

“That tracks,” I say.

“Don’t judge my car.”