Pop sat in his wheelchair beside the parts washer, a big man gone soft at the edges, in a cardigan over his work shirt because he would not give up the work shirt. When Ezra got to the part about the dash dropping out with every click, Pop's eyebrows went up. When Ezra got to "third row, second from the left," Pop made a fist and knocked it twice on the arm of the chair, which meant yes, which meant good.
Then Ezra told the rest. Mr. Kessler. The glass office. Mama coming out with her eyes like that. A written warning, she'd said in the car, a written warning for bringing a minor into a customer area, and another one would be termination, and did Ezra understand what termination meant, and he'd said yes, and she'd said I need you to understand it with your stomach and not just your head, and then neither of them had said anything all the way down Route 9.
Pop listened to that part with his face still. At the end he reached out with his good hand, the right one, and put it flat on the bench, on the old rubber mat, where the alternators used to sit while he rebuilt them.
"Listen," he said.
"I was listening. That's how I heard it."
Pop shook his head, slow. He tapped the mat. Then he tapped his own ear, and then his chest, and then, very gently, Ezra's chest.
Ezra didn't know what that meant. He thought maybe Pop didn't either, not in words.
He had learned all of it here, on this stool. Before he could read well he'd sorted bolts by size into coffee cans for a quarter a can. At six he could tell a starter from an alternator by weight with his eyes closed. At eight, Pop had given him the yellow multimeter with the cracked case and taught him the three things: volts are pressure, amps are flow, ohms are how hard the wire fights you. They'd tested every outlet in the house. They'd tested the Christmas lights and found the one bulb. They'd tested Aunt Bernice's dryer and found a thermal fuse the size of a vitamin.
After the stroke, the lessons got harder and better. Pop couldn't explain anymore, so he showed. He'd put a part in Ezra's hands and point at the manual, a fat repair book with grease thumbprints on the pages, and make Ezra read the diagram out loud until it made sense. Saturdays, before the money got too tight, Mama would drive them to Kearney's U-Pull on the county road, eight dollars to walk the rows, and Pop would go along in his transport chair while Ezra pushed, and they would stop at cars with their hoods up and Pop would point: that one, that one, pull that. Ezra pulled relays out of a hundred dead cars — Fords, Hondas, a wrecked Audi that smelled like a wet dog, a burnt-out Mercedes with its seats melted — and brought them home in a coffee can, and they'd test them on the bench with a nine-volt battery and a test light. Good ones clicked once and held. Bad ones chattered, or did nothing, or held and dropped. Pop made him listen to hundreds. Listen. Listen. Listen. Until Ezra could tell a tired relay from a dying one the way his mother could tell from the hallway which of his coughs meant a real fever.
It was not magic. He wanted somebody to understand that. It was coffee cans and Saturdays and a cracked yellow meter and a man who couldn't talk making him do it again.
Mama came out to the shop at nine with two plates of rice and smothered chicken covered in foil. She set them on the bench and stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, looking at the two of them in the hanging light, and for a minute she looked like she was going to say something sharp.
Instead she said, "Was it really the relay?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"You're sure."