"It was my father's," he said. "He bought it in 1991, used, off his own lot. He was so proud of it he wouldn't drive it in the rain. It's been dying in my garage every four or five days since summer. I've had it to two shops. One replaced the battery and one replaced the alternator." He looked at Julian, then at Pop, then at Ezra. "I was told you repair whatever's broken."
Nobody said anything for a while. A crow walked along the roofline of the house. Julian, wiping his hands on a red shop towel, very deliberately said nothing, because it was not his shop and not his call.
Ezra looked at his grandfather. Pop looked back at him over the rim of his coffee cup, and his eyebrows went up, and he didn't knock on the arm of the chair, either way. He just waited. It was, Ezra understood, the hardest lesson Pop had ever given him: no answer at all.
Ezra looked at the car. It was an old car, built before half the parts he knew existed, its wiring probably brittle under the dash, its relays the old square kind you could still find at Kearney's in a coffee can. He thought about the three hours in the caramel chair. He thought about the still image on the desk, the color of weak tea. He thought about the man setting his watch on a walnut table, face up, and saying yes.
He thought: being able to fix something doesn't mean you have to. And not fixing it doesn't fix anything either.
"Pop's rate is eighty-five an hour," he said. "Diagnosis first. It's going to take a while, because on a car this old you have to let it sit and go to sleep before you can find what's draining it, and you can't open the doors while it does."
"That's fine," Mr. Kessler said.
"And you have to wait over there." Ezra pointed at the corner of the shop, where a single plastic lawn chair sat against the cinderblock, white once, gone gray, beside a coffee can of sorted bolts and a stack of old repair manuals. "You can read if you want. But you can't touch anything."
Mr. Kessler looked at the chair for a long moment. Then he walked across the oil-stained concrete, past Pop, who nodded to him exactly once, and sat down in it, and folded his hands in his lap.
Ezra popped the hood. He bent over the engine bay, the old dusty metal, the brittle loom, and unclipped the yellow multimeter with the cracked case from his belt. He didn't know yet what was wrong with the car. He didn't know whether, when he found it, he'd say anything more to the man in the plastic chair than the cause and the correction and the price. He didn't know if his mother would mail the application on the kitchen table, or if the lettering over the door would ever get finished, or if a written apology and a cake in blue gel and a Saturday rate sheet added up to anything you could call fair.
But the shop was quiet, and the morning light came in flat across the bench and the coffee cans and the old man in the chair and the other old man in the other chair, and somewhere under the dash of a dead man's car something small was ticking, very faintly, waiting for someone to hear it.
"Listen," Pop said.
Ezra listened.