"I heard you picked up a fleet contract." "That's right." Owen looked at the floor, pushed a piece of grit around with his boot.
"We've been trying to get one of those for about a year. Gordon Fitch's lot. He came to us first, actually." Ray said nothing. "I just..."
Owen stopped. Started again. "I'm not here to give you a hard time." He said it like it cost him something. "Dale said I should come over. I didn't want to."
He looked up. "But I'm over here." Ray looked at him for a long moment. "Okay," he said.
Owen nodded. He stood there another beat, like he might say something else. Then he turned and walked back through the gate. Ray watched him go.
Cal appeared from the back bay. "Was that Owen?" "Yeah." "What did he want?"
"To show up," Ray said. Cal thought about that. "That it?" "That's a lot sometimes," Ray said.
Cal considered this seriously, in the way that young men do when someone older says something they're not sure they understand, but want to. Then he went back to work. At 6:30, Ray finished the last invoice of the day, turned off the radio, and locked the bay. He went into the small bathroom at the back of the shop and washed his face and hands properly, changed out of his work shirt into the clean one he kept in his truck, combed his hair.
He drove the two blocks to the diner with the red awning. Nadia was already there. Back booth, like she'd said. She had a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking yet, and her phone was turned face down on the table.
He noticed that. In his experience, a phone placed face down on a table in a restaurant meant the person had decided to be present. It was a small decision. It was a real one.
He slid into the seat across from her. "The coffee is bad," she said. "You warned me," he said. She almost smiled.
"I did." The waiter came. Ray ordered coffee. Nadia turned hers face up and ordered another.
They talked for 3 hours about Cora: what she was like as a small girl, how she had her father's stubbornness and her mother's memory for detail, and how the year had been hard in ways that teenagers don't have words for yet but feel with everything they have. They talked briefly and plainly about the divorce, about the building downtown and what it had cost to build it, and what it had cost that had nothing to do with money. And they talked about Lily. Ray didn't talk about her much.
But he talked about her tonight. The Thursdays, the stool, the way she used to tell him the shop smelled like something real, and how he had laughed at that, and how he would give everything he owned to hear her say it one more time. Nadia listened the way very few people had ever listened to him, not waiting for her turn, not looking for the place to insert comfort, just listening, the way you hold a door open for someone, fully, without rushing them. She told him about a morning last year when she had sat in her office on the 14th floor before anyone else arrived, watching the city come awake, and realized she had not had a conversation in 6 months that wasn't about money, or strategy, or solving something, that she had become very good at solving things and had quietly forgotten how to just be in a room with another person without an agenda.
She said she wasn't sure when that had happened. He said he wasn't sure when it had happened for him, either. They looked at each other across the table. "This isn't going to be simple," she said.
She was not talking about the engine mount or the fleet contract. "No," he agreed. "I'm complicated," she said. "So am I. I have a daughter who is 17 and pays attention to everything."
"I know," he said. "She called me." Nadia blinked. "She called you?"
"To say thank you." Nadia was quiet. She looked down at her coffee cup for a moment, and when she looked back up, there was something in her face that wasn't there before, something unguarded, something she didn't try to put away. "She doesn't do that," Nadia said.