"Is he a pilot too?"
"He was a mechanic. City buses. He could fix anything with an engine." Naomi paused at the top of the steps. "He passed three years ago. But he's the one who drove me to the fence."
Jasmine looked at the car with new seriousness, as if it had become a different kind of object. "It's really pretty," she said.
"It's really stubborn," Naomi said. "Goodnight, Jaz. Get some sleep. Pilots need sleep."
"Goodnight, Captain."
Odette did not pull away immediately. Naomi noticed this and was grateful for it, the small courtesy of a woman who drove the night loop and knew what an empty lot felt like at midnight; she would wait until Naomi was in the car with the engine running before she moved on. Naomi wheeled her bag down the row, unlocked the Skylark's trunk with the long chrome key, laid the bag inside, closed it with the solid two-handed thunk that new cars had forgotten how to make, and got in behind the wheel.
The bench seat smelled like her father. That was not her imagination; she had tested it, the way she tested everything. It smelled like old vinyl and Armor All and, very faintly, under all of that, the Old Spice he had worn every day of his adult life and the Lava soap he had scrubbed his hands with every night. She had never been able to bring herself to have the interior redone. She put the key in the ignition and turned it.
Nothing.
Not nothing exactly. A click, flat and dry, from somewhere under the hood. The dash lights glowed, the radio came on to the oldies station her father had left it tuned to, and the starter did not turn.
"Not tonight," Naomi said to the car. "Please. Not tonight."
She knew this sound. Her father had known it, too, and had refused for twenty years to fix it properly because, he said, the original starter was a perfectly good starter that was simply getting old, the way perfectly good people got old, and you did not throw it away just because it needed a little encouragement now and then. The solenoid stuck. When it stuck you lifted the hood, found the starter where it sat low on the passenger side of the engine block, and gave it two smart taps with something heavy. Her father had kept a short, rubber-handled ball-peen hammer under the driver's seat for exactly this purpose for as long as she could remember. It was still there.
She reached under the seat, found the hammer, pulled the hood release, and got out.
She glanced back toward the shuttle shelter. Odette was still there, the shuttle's interior lights glowing yellow, and Naomi raised the hammer in a little wave that meant it's fine, just the starter, one minute, and Odette waved back. Naomi went around to the front of the car, lifted the long hood, propped it, slipped her phone out of her coat pocket and turned on its flashlight, and leaned in over the fender with the hammer in her right hand.