Every part of Ezra that had been raised said: yes sir. Sorry, sir. Walk back to the chair.
But under the hood, the little man was still opening and closing his door, tick—tick—tick, because the salesman had forgotten to take his finger off the button, and the sound was so plain to Ezra that walking away from it felt like lying.
He looked up and met Mr. Kessler's eyes, and then Julian's.
"The relay is cycling."
Julian straightened slowly, his back cracking. He looked at Ezra for the first time, really looked, the way you look at a gauge you didn't know was there. "We already replaced it."
"Then you replaced the wrong one."
Mr. Kessler laughed, one short note through the nose. He folded his arms across his chest, and the watch caught the window light. "You repair Bentleys now?"
"I repair whatever's broken," Ezra said.
He hadn't planned that either. It was a thing Pop used to say, back when Pop could say whole sentences, standing in the door of Gaines Auto Electric with a rag in his back pocket, when people came in with lawn mowers and box fans and once a church organ. I don't repair brands. I repair whatever's broken.
Julian wiped his hands on a red shop towel. He did not smile, but something in his face had gone still and interested. "Which relay?"
The relay box was open on the passenger side of the engine bay, its black lid propped against the strut tower, a neat grid of cubes in gray and black plastic. Ezra had been watching it for four tries. On the last two, he'd been close enough to hear exactly where the ticking came from, and to see, under the right light, the faintest jump in the wire loom behind it every time it clicked.
"Third row," he said. "Second from the left."
"That won't fix anything," Mr. Kessler said, and he said it with a kind of pity, as if he were sorry for everyone involved.
Julian looked at the box. Then he looked at the lid, at the printed legend on the underside, and ran a dirty fingertip down the columns. Ezra watched his lips move. Then Julian looked at the first row, at a relay labeled for the horn, and Ezra saw him check the part number stamped on top of it against the one in the third row. Same number. Same little gray cube.