She carried her phone in her hand, not in a bag. She was somewhere in her early 40s. She had the face of someone who had made a lot of decisions under pressure for a long time. Not hard, just precise.
She walked toward him and put out her hand. He shook it. "Mr. Decker." "Ray," he said.
She nodded, accepting that. Nadia. He walked around to the driver's side, got in, started the engine, and sat with it for a moment. He could feel the vibration right away.
It was small, coming from somewhere in the front. He revved it slightly, let it settle back to idle, revved it again. He had a feeling about what it was. He got out and popped the hood.
She stood back and watched him work. She didn't hover. She didn't ask every 30 seconds what he was seeing. She just watched, and the watching was the kind that missed nothing.
He found it within 4 minutes. One of the engine mounts was beginning to wear. Not failed, not even close to failing, but enough to send a small vibration up through the chassis at idle. Easy fix.
Inexpensive part. She could have driven it another 3 months without incident. He straightened up and told her this. She looked at him.
"How long would it take to fix?" "I'd need to order the mount. Could have it in tomorrow, done by early afternoon." "Good," she said.
"I'll leave the car." He nodded. He wrote up a quick estimate on the clipboard he kept at the bay entrance. She looked at it for barely a second and nodded.
She didn't negotiate. She didn't look for a reason to doubt the number. She just accepted it the way someone accepts something when they have already decided to trust you. And that decision had been made before she walked in.
He noticed that. He handed her the clipboard to sign. She signed it and handed it back. "Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Go ahead." "How long have you run this shop alone?" "12 years. I've got a part-time kid who comes in 3 days a week, but mostly, yeah, just me."
She looked around the shop slowly, at the organized tool wall, at the way the invoices were filed, at the floor, which was stained and old, but clean, at the sign above the door that had one letter still dark. "You ever think about expanding?" He thought about it the way he thought about most things, without rushing. "No."
"Why not?" He leaned against the truck he'd been working on all morning. "There are two kinds of people in a business: people who are building something and people who are fixing something. I've always been the second kind. You try to be both things at once, you usually end up doing neither one right."
She looked at him for a moment. Not the way people look at you when they're waiting for you to stop talking, the way they look when something you said landed somewhere in them and they're deciding what to do with it. "That's a very specific way to see it," she said. "It's the only way I know how to see it."
She was quiet for a moment, then she looked back at the car. "She's been having a difficult year," she said. "My daughter. Cora," she said her daughter's name the way parents say their children's names when they're talking to someone outside the family for the first time, careful, like the name itself was something fragile.
"She gets her license in 3 months, and she's been driving with me on the weekends to practice. Last night was the first time she took the car out on her own." "She drove well," Ray said. "She was careful pulling out of here."
Nadia looked at him. "You noticed that?" "I notice how people drive. It's a habit."