"He told me I'd get another forty thousand miles out of the rotors and I got sixty." Mr. Chilton folded his wallet and put it in his back pocket. "I was sorry to hear. I didn't come in after. I should have."
"That's all right."
"He was a good man. He did right by people."
"Thank you," she said. "He was."
When Mr. Chilton had gone, she turned the sign on the door and pulled the roll-down gate over the two bays and walked through the shop turning off the lights in the order her father had turned them off, the compressor last, so that the building went quiet in stages, like a body falling asleep. Mirsad had left at four to pick up his wife from her shift at the hospital laundry. The shop smelled the way it always smelled at the end of the week, of brake cleaner and gear oil and coffee that had sat on the warmer since noon, and under that, faintly, of the rosewater she kept in a spray bottle in the bathroom and used on her hands and wrists after she washed, a habit from her mother, who believed that a woman who worked with engines should not also have to smell like one.
She made wudu in the small bathroom at the back, carefully, the way she had been taught at seven in a basement in Doboj with water from a jerrycan, and at nine in a sink in a refugee apartment in Stuttgart, and at thirteen, again, in St. Louis, in the bathroom of the first rented apartment on Itaska Street where the hot water ran brown for the first ten seconds. Hands, mouth, nose, face, arms to the elbows, the wet palms over her head over the scarf, the ears, the feet. Her nails were short and there was a line of black under the right thumbnail that would not come out with any soap she had ever found, and she had long ago stopped worrying whether it made the wudu incomplete; she had asked the imam once, when she was twenty and anxious about everything, and he had looked at her hand and laughed, not unkindly, and said that if God required mechanics to have clean fingernails there would be no Muslim mechanics, and the cars of the umma would all break down.
She prayed Asr on the rug in the office, between the filing cabinet and the window that looked out on the back lot. The rug was her father's, a cheap machine-made thing with a mihrab woven in red and gold that he had bought at a store on Gravois in 1999 and that she had never been able to replace, because she had tried once and found that she could not pray on the new one without feeling that she was in a hotel. Through the window, while she stood and bowed and knelt and touched her forehead to the floor, she could see the shape of the car under its cover, the long sloped back of it, the squared-off nose.
When she finished she sat a moment on her heels. It was ten minutes to five. Kenan's practice at Carondelet Park ended at six, and he had told her that morning, with the deep moral seriousness of a nine-year-old, that she could not be late again, because when she was late Coach Villalobos made him wait on the bench with the kids whose parents were always late, and he did not want to be one of those kids. She had promised. She had forty minutes for the car and twenty to get to the park, and that was enough if she did not stop for anything, except that the tank was low, and the car did not like to run low; the old fuel pickup drew air when the tank was down near empty and the engine would stumble and she would have to bleed it on the shoulder of the road with a rag and a wrench, which she had done twice, both times while someone slowed down beside her to ask whether she needed them to call her husband.
She took the cover off and folded it the way her father had folded it, hem to hem and then in thirds, and set it on the shelf by the back door.
It was not a beautiful car, if you did not know what you were looking at. It was a big square sedan the color of weak tea, which the paint code called champagne and her father had called, in German, because German was the language he had learned cars in, Sahne, cream. The chrome on the bumpers was real chrome. The hubcaps were the flat round kind that people her son's age thought looked like the lids of cooking pots. There was a dent the size of a fist in the rear passenger door that her father had decided not to fix because it had been put there, he said, by the car's first life, and a car should be allowed to keep one scar to remember. The vinyl seats were a reddish brown he had found, after eleven months of looking, in a junkyard in Belleville, Illinois, out of a car that had sat in a barn in a dry county and had been driven, by the odometer, only thirty-one thousand miles before someone put it away and forgot it. The radio was a Becker he had found on the internet from a man in Ohio and driven six hours to pick up because he did not trust the mail with it. The engine he had rebuilt himself, on a stand in the second bay, over two winters, in the evenings after the shop closed, while Selma did homework at the counter and then, later, did the books at the counter and then, later still, came in after her own children were asleep to hand him tools and listen to him talk.
He had talked about Stuttgart, mostly. About Herr Bauer.