"You could've said something on Thursday."
"Yes, ma'am." He made himself not look away. "I should have. I'm not here so you'll say it's fine."
She studied him the way her son had studied the engine. Behind her, down the hallway, Julian could see a kitchen table, and a big man in a wheelchair, and a boy in a navy hoodie standing very still in the doorway to another room.
"Daddy," Yolanda said over her shoulder, without taking her eyes off Julian, "the man from the dealership is here."
Pop said, from the kitchen, loud and clear: "Listen."
Yolanda closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, something in her had shifted a quarter turn, the way a stuck bolt finally gives. "That car of yours keeps dying," she said. "Doesn't it."
Julian blinked. "How'd you —"
"You parked it on a slope and left it in neutral with the brake on, like a man who's afraid it won't restart. My father used to have a shop."
In the end, they went out to the green building, all four of them, Ezra pushing Pop's chair down the ramp and across the gravel and Yolanda unlocking the padlock with a key on a shoelace. The bay door went up with a shriek of old springs. Inside, under the hanging lights, it was clean in a way Julian recognized: not showroom clean, workshop clean, every tool on its outline, coffee cans of bolts labeled in marker, a bench with a rubber mat worn smooth in the shape of a thousand alternators.
He didn't mean it as a test. That's what he told himself later. But when Ezra asked, quietly, from beside the bench, "How many days does it take to die?" Julian heard himself answer like he'd answer an apprentice: "Three. Four if it's warm."
"Did you do a draw test?"
"I've been meaning to." Julian felt his ears get hot. Nine years a master tech, and his daughter's car had been dying in parking lots for a month because he came home every night too tired to look.
Ezra looked at Pop. Pop knocked twice on the arm of his chair.