I don't know, she said. And then, more honestly, I think she does. And for the first time, Ava lifted her head. She looked at Marcus with those red- rimmed eyes, big and dark and serious, in the way that children's eyes get when they've been carrying something too heavy for their size. And she said in the smallest voice he'd ever heard, "Carry so much certainty because you always fix things." Marcus sent Terry home early.
He pulled two chairs out to the workt near the back. The clean side, the side where he sometimes ate lunch and read the paper and pretended for 30 minutes that his shop was just a shop and not also the only place in the world he knew how to be anymore. He made coffee not because he needed it, but because his hands needed something to do, and because offering coffee was the way his mother had taught him to tell someone, "You can stay a little while." Naomi sat down like she wasn't sure she'd earned the right to. Ava climbed into the chair beside her and sat with her feet not quite reaching the floor, looking around the garage at everything except Marcus. How long has she been coming here after school?
He asked. Naomi closed her eyes briefly. I didn't know she was. I thought she was going to the afterchool program at the rec center. A beat.
Apparently, she stopped going to the rec center in February. February, Marcus repeated. She told me she preferred it here. Naomi looked like she didn't know whether to apologize or cry. I work double shifts sometimes three days in a row.
I thought she was I thought someone was watching her. I didn't know she was coming here. Marcus looked at Ava. Is that true? You've been coming here since February.
Ava nodded without looking at him. Why didn't you tell me? He asked, not accusatory, genuinely curious. Ava shrugged one shoulder. You didn't say I couldn't.
And Marcus almost smiled. He caught it before it reached his face, but it was close. He had noticed her. That was the truth. He hadn't figured out what to do with yet.
A little girl who started showing up around 3:45 most afternoons, sitting on the bench outside the bay door with a backpack and a water bottle watching him work. She never asked for anything, never disrupted anything, just sat there like watching engines get fixed was the most comforting thing in the world. He'd brought her a juice box one afternoon without saying much. She'd taken it and said, "Thank you." That was about the extent of their conversations for the first two months. Then one day, she'd asked him what he was doing to a Ford Escapes brake line.
And he'd told her, and she'd asked three more questions, and before he fully understood what had happened, he was explaining caliper pistons to an 8-year-old who was nodding like she was taking mental notes. He'd given her a little badge. It was nothing a laminated card with junior mechanic Johnson's auto printed on it. The kind of thing he made for neighborhood kids who helped him at the occasional community car wash event. He'd given her one, mostly to give her something to do with her hands because she had the kind of energy that needed a place to go.
She'd treated it like he'd handed her a gold medal. He just hadn't known. He hadn't known what it meant to her. He hadn't known no one had ever given her a thing like that before. He hadn't known that when she went home at night and her mother asked her about her day, she talked about the garage.
He hadn't known she'd told her entire third grade class that the man at the auto shop was her dad. He was finding all of that out now. She talks about you. Naomi said quietly. She was looking at her coffee cup.
Almost every night at dinner, Mr. Marcus said this. Mr. Marcus showed me that. Mr. Marcus thinks the Panthers have a shot this season. A short tired laugh. I honestly thought she was making some of it up.
Kids embellish. But she'd come home with engine grease on her hands and a whole explanation for where it came from. And I'd listen and I'd think, "Who is this man? And why does my daughter trust him more than anyone she's ever met?" Marcus didn't say anything. "I looked into you," Naomi said.
She said it plainly without apology. After the second month, I talked to people in the neighborhood. Everyone said the same thing. She finally looked up at him. They said you were a good man.
They said you'd lost your wife. They said you were the kind of person who helps people without needing to make a thing out of it. Still, Marcus said nothing. They also said you were lonely. She said, "I don't know if that's true, and I'm not saying it to be.
It's not an angle. I'm not trying to." She stopped, pressed her fingers to her forehead. "I'm making a mess of this. You're doing fine," Marcus said. She looked at him.
Something surprised moved across her face at those three words. "Ava," Marcus said, turning to the girl. "Can I ask you something?" Ava finally looked at him fully straight on. That was a thing he'd noticed about her months ago when she decided to look at you. She really looked at you.
No sideways glances, no distracted eyes. She looked at a person like they were the only thing in the room. "Yeah," she said. Why didn't you just ask me yourself? A long pause, long enough that Marcus wondered if he'd crossed a line.
Then Ava said very seriously, "Because what if you said no?" And there it was. That was the whole thing right there, packed into six words and delivered with the kind of quiet devastation that only a child can produce because they haven't yet learned to dress their fear in anything else. What if you said no? Marcus leaned forward. Put both elbows on the table.
"And what if I say no right now?" Ava's chin tilted up just slightly. "Then I'll be okay," she said in a voice that was trying hard to mean it. "I've been okay before." That sentence hit Marcus somewhere deep and specific, and it took him a full 5 seconds to recover from it. "I've been okay before, 8 years old." He looked at Naomi. She was looking at Ava with the particular expression of a mother watching her child.