PART 4:

, which she told herself was a perfectly normal thing to do, and which she knew was not entirely about the coffee. The garage door was open. Adrienne was underneath the car on a creeper, only his legs visible. Mason was sitting on the folding chair with a coloring book, working with the specific intensity of a 7-year-old who has decided that coloring is a professional endeavor.

Evelyn stopped at the edge of the garage. “I made too much coffee,” she said, which was the announcement she’d prepared. Mason looked up. “Dad drinks a lot of coffee,” he reported helpfully. “He says it’s a character flaw. from under the car. It is a character flaw. “I’ve got a thermos,” Evelyn said.

Adrienne slid out from under the car on the creeper. He was wearing a gray t-shirt with a stain on the shoulder that was probably not recent, and he had a smudge of something dark across one cheekbone, and he looked, she noticed, and then decided she hadn’t noticed. Not bad for a man who had been lying on pavement. He sat up and looked at the thermos.

“Red thermos,” he said. “Only one I have.” What kind? Dark roast from Ronnie’s diner. I work there. I I have access. He accepted the thermos and poured some into the cup of a cup that was sitting on the garage floor and had the words world’s okayest mechanic printed on the side. He drank. He nodded. Good, he said. I know, she said, because it was.

She stayed for an hour. She sat on an overturned bucket near Mason’s chair. Adrienne produced the bucket from somewhere with the efficiency of a man who always knows where the extra bucket is, and she watched him work while Mason explained his coloring book to her in detail that suggested he had given the backstories of each character considerable thought.

She found herself watching Adrienne’s hands more than anything else. The way they moved over the car was different from anything she’d seen before. Not confident in the showy sense, but certain, like someone reading a language they’ve known their whole life. He didn’t fumble. He didn’t second guess.

He moved from one thing to the next with an economy of motion that suggested a brain working significantly faster than the hands it was directing. “Can I ask what you’re looking for?” she said during a gap in Mason’s narrative. He didn’t answer immediately. She was starting to understand that his silences were not evasions.

They were him deciding whether the thing he was about to say was actually what he meant to say. “I found some markings,” he said, on the frame. Serial numbers basically, but not standard. He paused. This car was handbuilt, which isn’t unusual for a custom project, but the geometry is there are things here that don’t match anything in normal production.

What does that mean? I don’t know yet, he said, and she believed him. And she also believed that yet was carrying significant weight in that sentence. Mason looked up from his coloring. Dad thinks it’s special. Mason,” Adrienne said, which was a one-word sentence that meant, “Don’t say things I haven’t decided yet.

” “He does, though,” Mason told Evelyn, undeterred. Evelyn looked at the car, the damaged, ugly, rust eaten car sitting in the fluorescent wash of the garage lights, and tried to see what Adrienne saw in it. She couldn’t quite, but she could see something in the way he looked at it, a focus that had nothing to do with $100 investments.

She walked home at 9:30 with the empty thermos and she was thinking about something her father had said once, standing over his Mustang with his hands on his hips on a cold Saturday morning. The thing about broken things is most people stop looking at them, which means most people never see what’s underneath. She hadn’t thought about that in years.

By Thursday, the novelty of the rusted wreck had converted on Sycamore Drive from a source of mockery into something more complicated. It had started with Dale Hutchkins, who had nothing better to do on his day off, and wandered down the sidewalk Thursday morning with the pretense of checking his mailbox, which was in the opposite direction, and ended up standing in front of Adrienne’s driveway for 15 minutes.

He couldn’t see much. The car was inside the garage now, positioned on the lift, and the garage door was closed, but he could hear something. Metal, and a kind of deliberate quiet between the sounds that felt somehow significant. He mentioned it to Darlene. Darlene, who operated with the situational intelligence of a small field general, made three phone calls in a next door post that was technically a question about neighborhood noise ordinances, but was actually a dispatch requesting reconnaissance.

By Thursday evening, there was a pattern of foot traffic past number 12. People walking dogs, walking children, walking nothing that was sufficiently unusual that even Mason noticed and mentioned it to his father. Why do people keep going past? Mason asked. Curiosity, Adrienne said. About the car? Probably.

Mason thought about this. Should we close the blinds? Adrien almost smiled. We don’t have anything to hide, bud. This was not entirely accurate. As it turned out, what Adrien had been doing in the hours when he wasn’t cleaning or examining was research. He had taken photographs of every marking, every stamped number, every piece of hand fabricated geometry he could find.

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