"Hi, sweetheart."
She handed me a coffee. She looked at the freezer, and at the tools laid out on the shop towel, and at the old radio on the shelf playing the Browns pregame. She looked around the garage as if she hadn't been inside it in a long time, which I suppose she hadn't.
"What's wrong with it?" she said.
I told her. Start capacitor, probably. Maybe the relay. She nodded like she understood, and then she said, "Can I hold the light?"
I didn't trust my voice, so I just handed her the flashlight.
She held it steady while I got the cover off the compressor housing, and neither of us said anything for a while. The pregame show went to commercial.
"I wasn't ashamed of you," she said finally. "I want you to know that. That's not what it was."
I didn't say anything. I waited.
"Okay, that's a lie. I was. A little. But it's not—it's not you, Dad. It's me. It's what I've been doing to myself for, like, ten years." She moved the light to follow my hand without my having to ask. "Do you know what my boss said to me at my review in March? Sloane. She said, 'What I love about you, Margot, is you have such a clean story.' And I said thank you. Like it was a compliment. And then I went in the bathroom and thought about what she meant, and I realized she meant that nobody at work knows a single thing about where I'm from. Because I never tell them. Because I have spent every day since I was eighteen making sure that nobody could tell."
"You don't have to—"
"Let me finish. Please." She took a breath. "Peter's family is—you saw them. Philippa sits on the board of the Clinic Foundation. Graham's family has been in Shaker Heights since before it was Shaker Heights. They've been nothing but nice to me. Nothing but nice. And every single time I'm with them, I feel like I'm taking a test I didn't study for. Like I'm going to use the wrong fork and Philippa's going to look at me the way she looks at a waiter who brings the wrong wine. And then I saw you walk in, in that jacket, and I just thought—" She stopped. Her voice cracked. "I thought, Oh, there it is. There's the answer key. Now they know."
I set down my screwdriver. I looked at her.
"Know what?" I said.
She didn't answer. She just held the light.
IX