"Okay," he said instead, which was different, and Mr. Kessler seemed to understand that it was different, and stood in the lot with his hands at his sides while they drove away.
Yolanda went back to work the next morning, because the light bill did not care about anybody's apology. Osvaldo had saved her locker. The porters had bought a cake from the grocery store that said WELCOME BACK YOLI in blue gel, misspelled, because nobody called her Yoli. She ate a piece standing up in the wash bay at 6:15 a.m. and laughed for the first time in a week.
But that night, after Ezra was asleep, she sat at the kitchen table with Pop and filled out an application for a fleet-maintenance coordinator position with the county, the kind of job that came with a pension and a parking spot and nobody's showroom. She left the last page blank, the one that asked for a reason for leaving current employer. She didn't know yet what the true answer was, or whether she would send it.
Pop watched her write. When she stopped, he pushed his speech workbook across the table. He'd been practicing a new word. It took him four tries, his face working, his good hand pressing flat on the oilcloth, before it came out whole.
"Choose," he said.
IX.
On the first Saturday in November, the bay door of Gaines Auto Electric went up at eight in the morning with a shriek of old springs, and it stayed up.
It wasn't a grand reopening. There was no ribbon. Julian had replaced the door springs the weekend before, and Yolanda had spent an afternoon on a ladder repainting the lettering, though she'd only gotten as far as GAINES AUTO EL before she ran out of white. Pop's chair sat in its place by the parts washer, and Pop sat in it, in his cardigan over his work shirt, with a cup of coffee in his good hand and the hand-lettered rate sheet taped to the wall beside him: SATURDAYS ONLY. $85/HR. DIAGNOSIS FIRST. NO GUARANTEES ON FEELINGS.
That last line had been Yolanda's.
Julian came on Saturdays when he didn't have Hazel. He wasn't paid; he'd refused, and Yolanda had refused his refusal, and they had settled on lunch. He did the heavy work. Ezra did the listening. Pop did the deciding. Last week it had been a church van with a dead fuel pump relay, and a lawn tractor, and a box fan that turned out to be a box fan nobody should have kept.
At ten-thirty, a car turned off Route 9 onto the gravel and came up the drive very slowly, like it wasn't sure it would be let in. It was a 1986 Mercedes coupe, a cream-colored 560SL, old and well kept, with a little rust bubbling at the lip of one wheel arch. It stopped outside the bay. The engine shut off.
Warren Kessler got out. He wasn't wearing a suit. He was wearing khakis and a quarter-zip sweater, and he looked, without the suit, smaller, and older, and like somebody's grandfather at a Little League game.
He stood at the edge of the gravel, outside the bay, not stepping in.