Ms. Sato had come for the first twenty minutes, in her scorched cardigan, with a printed copy of the competition's student-built rule and a pair of safety glasses for Dez that actually fit. She asked Sal about the guards and the emergency stop, and then asked Walter, very politely, to explain how he intended to teach a sixth-grader to turn a gear blank without touching the work himself.
"With my mouth," Walter said. "I've got thirty-one years of apprentices who'll tell you my mouth is the worst part of me."
She'd studied him, and then nodded once, and Dez had nearly fallen over. She left them a note with her cell number and went home to her own kids.
So now it was the three of them: two old men and a boy, under the long fluorescent lights.
"Before you touch anything," Walter said, "you're going to tell me every part of this machine and what it does. Then you're going to tell me every way it can hurt you. Then you're going to tell me again."
It took forty minutes. Headstock, tailstock, carriage, cross-slide, compound. Chuck key out of the chuck, always, every time. No gloves near the spindle. Sleeves rolled. Braids tied back. Walter looped a rubber band around Dez's braids at the nape of his neck himself, with the same hands that had braided them Saturday.
Then Dez chucked a round of 4140 steel, set the tool, checked the height against the center, and turned the lathe on.
The sound filled the shop. A low, deep rotation, like a big cat purring. Dez's heart was going so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
"Feed in slow," Walter said behind him. "Slower. Listen to it. Hear that? It's telling you it's happy. If it starts to sing, you're going too fast. If it starts to chatter, back off."
The first chip curled off the stock, blue and hot, a little spring of steel. Dez made a sound he didn't know he could make.
"There it is," Walter said. His voice had gone rough. "There it is."
They faced the blank. They turned it to diameter, checking with Walter's own micrometer, a Starrett No. 230 with the chrome mostly worn off the thimble, which Walter pulled from his shirt pocket, where he apparently still carried it after twenty-two years. Then they moved to Sal's Bridgeport mill and the dividing head, and Walter explained the arithmetic of indexing. Forty turns of the crank for one turn of the spindle, so for twenty teeth, two full turns between each cut. Dez had it before he finished explaining, and Walter stopped and looked at him and said, "Well, of course you do."
It was nine-forty when the door at the front of the shop opened and Renita walked in.
She was in her scrubs top with her work badge still clipped to it and her car keys in her fist. Jalen had told her where they were. He'd said it at the door when she got home, *Grandpa took Dez to Mr. Ferrante's to make a gear,* and then gone into his room and shut the door before she could ask him anything, and she'd stood in the hallway with her bag still on her shoulder and felt the floor tilt.
She hadn't been inside a machine shop in twenty years. The smell got her before anything else. Cutting oil and hot metal and old coffee. It was the smell of the basement on Glide Street, of her father's work shirts in the laundry, of being nine on a stool, and then twenty-nine on the stairs listening to the lathe run at midnight while her mother slept alone.
Dez was at the mill in safety glasses that made his eyes look huge, his braids banded back, his face lit with a concentration she knew from the inside, because it was her own face at that age. Walter stood a careful two feet behind him with his hands clasped behind his back like a man in a museum. On the bench lay a steel gear, its teeth bright and new.
"Mom," Dez said, and stopped the spindle without being told. He came out from behind the machine. "We made it. *I* made it. Grandpa just talked."