Part 19:
Ukahor, I’ve only met once, but she’s exactly who she appears to be, which in my experience is rarer than it should be. Isabella made a sound that was somewhere between acknowledgement and something ry. Rare qualities. Yeah. Another silence. Then what would you do if it were yours? He didn’t answer immediately.
He let the question sit. I’d send it somewhere that would treat it like what it is, he said finally. Not a trophy, not an investment, an object with a specific story that deserves to be told properly. He paused. And I’d make sure the notebook was part of the record. Not hidden, not sensationalized, part of the record. because of what it says about my grandfather.
Because of what it says about why people keep things, he said, about what we’re trying to pass forward when we hold on to something longer than makes practical sense. The line was quiet for a moment. My father was like that, she said. He kept things, books, objects, that crate of botanical drawings. He held on to things because he believed they mattered, even when he couldn’t articulate why. Another pause.
I used to find it excessive. I used to think he was that it was a kind of avoidance. Caring about objects instead of she stopped. Instead of what? Instead of being present, she said quietly. For me. For us. A long pause. We weren’t close. He was he was a difficult man to be close to and I spent a long time thinking the objects were a substitute for something he didn’t know how to give. Ethan was quiet.
He didn’t offer an alternative reading. Didn’t rush to tell her she was wrong. But the notebook, she said the entry is about my father. My grandfather trying to communicate something he didn’t have language for. Hiding it in the thing he loved most. She paused. Maybe the objects weren’t a substitute. Maybe they were the language, the only one some people have.
He thought about the print on Richard Sterling’s office wall, the B04 designation. The car parked in a storage building for 20 years kept safe without full understanding. Maybe he said it doesn’t fix anything, she said. It doesn’t make the distance smaller. It doesn’t make up for it doesn’t change what it was. No, but it’s something. Yeah. He said it’s something.
The board meeting was 3 weeks later and Ethan wasn’t there for it because it was a Sterling Foundation internal matter that had nothing to do with him and he’d never pretended otherwise. But Patricia Crane texted him at 4 in the afternoon on the day of the meeting. She held her ground. Long-term institutional loan.
Detroit got a pending formal negotiation. Board was unhappy. She didn’t move. He read the text standing in the shop between the end of a break job and the start of an oil change. And he felt something settle in him that he hadn’t realized was still unsettled. Marcus looked at him from across the shop. Good news. Yeah. Car stuff. Yeah.
Marcus nodded with the patient acceptance of someone who’d been working adjacent to this story for weeks without getting the full version. Cool, he said, and went back to what he was doing. Ethan pocketed his phone and moved to the next vehicle. Isabella called him the following week. He was in the shop parking lot eating lunch.
Same place, same too much butter sandwich bun when his phone buzzed with her name. He answered with a mouth partially full, which was not ideal. And she either didn’t notice or was too focused on what she was calling about to care. I want to ask you something, she said. Okay. the restoration. Detroit has agreed in principle to the institutional arrangement, but the restoration itself, uh, she paused.
The car needs to be brought back properly in a way that respects what it is without erasing what it’s been through, the rust, the history of it. Another pause. They have a restoration team, but I’ve been thinking, Isabella, he knew where this was going. You don’t have to, she said quickly. You have the shop. You have your other obligations.
I know I don’t have to. And I know you’ve been approached about other things. I know. So, if this isn’t Isabella, he stopped her. Are you asking me to lead the restoration? A pause. I’m asking if you’d consider it in a consultancy capacity with the Detroit team doing the primary work. You’d be overseeing, advising, making the calls that require the specific expertise.
Another pause. Paid properly. Patricia has a structure for it. He looked at his sandwich. He thought about the BO4 in the storage building, the handformed aluminum under the rust, the hammer marks in the panel that were the fingerprint of someone who had spent their life learning how to shape metal and had done it one last time on this particular car.
He thought about what it would mean to bring that back to sit with the process of returning something to what it had been or close enough. Close enough that the intention of it was legible again that you could look at it and understand what the person who made it was trying to say. He thought about Sophie’s question.
Can you fix it? And his answer, that’s not really my job on this one. He’d been wrong about that. Yes, he said. I’ll do it. A brief silence, then in a voice that had something relieved in it that she wasn’t quite disguising. Good. Send me Patricia’s structure. I’ll have my own attorney look at it. Of course, a pause. Ethan, again, his first name, this time clearly deliberate.
