Chapter One
The shirt is easier to fold than I expect. I don’t know why I thought it would be harder or maybe heavier somehow weighted with something that would make my hands slow down. But it folds the way any shirt folds. Sleeves in. Half, then half again. It goes in the box the same as everything else and the box does not care what it holds.
There is a coffee mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST MECHANIC that Coty bought him as a joke four Christmases ago and I have to decide whether it goes in the box or stays out. I stand in the kitchen for what might be four minutes or might be twenty, holding a mug and trying to remember why any of this is a decision I’m allowed to make alone. As I put it back in the cabinet. I don’t know why. Some decisions aren’t decisions. They’re just what your hands do while the rest of you waits somewhere else.
The porch light is on, even though it’s ten in the morning and has been on all night because I still haven’t trained myself to turn it off. Some mornings I catch myself waiting to hear the specific sound his bike makes on the gravel before I remember there’s no reason to leave it on anymore. I leave it on anyway. It doesn’t cost anything to leave a light on for no one.
I want to tell you this from the beginning, because I think that’s the only way it makes sense. The only way it doesn’t sound like something that happened to me, like weather or like an accident I didn’t see coming. It wasn’t an accident. Or, some of it was. The end of it, if I’m being precise, was the most ordinary kind of accident there is, is the kind that could happen to anyone, on any day for no reason that means anything at all. That part I still can’t make sense of and maybe I’m not supposed to. But everything before that, the year that led up to it, none of that was random. Every part of that we chose. Both of us. With our eyes open, the way you’re supposed to choose the things that are going to cost you the most.
So I’ll start there. Not at the end. At the beginning, when none of this had a shape yet, when he was just a guy standing in a garage with his hands covered in grease telling my brother not to worry about the money.
The first time I saw Dani Reyes was underneath a 1998 Honda Nighthawk telling my little brother he didn’t owe him anything.
“Seriously,” Dani said, from somewhere under the bike, in a voice that had the particular patience of someone repeating himself. “Forget it.” “It’s like four hundred dollars,” Marcus said. He had that specific panic in his voice he got whenever anyone was kind to him for no reason, like kindness was a bill that was going to come due later but with interest.
“It’s a busted carburetor,” Dani said. “It’s not four hundred dollars of anything. Go home.”
I was standing in the doorway of the garage holding a grocery bag with a rotisserie chicken going cold in it because Marcus had texted me an address and the word emergency and nothing else and I had driven fifteen minutes across town assuming there was blood involved. There was no blood. There was a bike up on a lift, a garage that smelled like motor oil and cut grass and a man I couldn’t see the face of yet, lying on a mechanic’s creeper with his boots sticking out from under the bike.
“You must be the emergency,” I said.
The boots stopped moving and a second later he rolled out from under the bike. I want to be honest about this part, because I’ve told this story enough times that I’ve started performing it a little, making it sound more like the beginning of a movie than it actually was. It wasn’t lightning. He didn’t look up at me like something had been decided. He looked tired and a little annoyed and there was a smear of grease along his jaw that would still be there, in almost the exact same spot, four different times over the next two years like his face had just decided that was where grease belonged now.
“He know you’re calling him that?” Dani said, nodding at Marcus, sitting up.
“He texted me emergency.”
“It’s a carburetor.”
“He’s twenty two. Everything’s an emergency.”
Dani almost smiled. Not quite. Like he was saving it for later and maybe deciding that I hadn’t earned the whole thing yet.
He stood up slow, slow in a way man who’ve spent their whole lives on their knees under something tend to stand so careful of a back that already knows what’s coming for it in twenty years. He was taller than I expected from just the boots. Not broad in a gym way, broad in a use way, the kind of build that comes from lifting things because they need lifting, not because a mirror is watching. His hands, when he wiped them on a rag that did nothing to actually clean them were the hands of someone who had never once in his life worried about his hands.
“You want to tell your brother,” he said, “that I fix these because I like fixing them and if he wants to pay me back he can come by on a Saturday and learn to change his own oil so he stops paying eighty bucks at the place on Grant that overcharges every college kid in a five mile radius.”
“That’s oddly specific,” I said.
“I used to work there.”
I laughed before I meant to. It came out too loud in the quiet of the garage and he looked pleased in a way he was clearly trying not to look, glancing down at the rag in his hands like it had suddenly become interesting. I noticed that about him immediately before I noticed almost anything else. He didn’t know what to do with being liked. He could hand a stranger’s kid brother a free repair without blinking but the second someone laughed at something he said, he looked for somewhere else to put his eyes.
I didn’t know yet that this was a pattern. That giving things away and refusing to be thanked for it was just the shape of him, the way some men are built for arguing and some are built for silence and he was built, specifically, for handing people things and walking away before they could say anything back. I didn’t know yet that he’d been doing a version of this, a much larger, much heavier version of this, for his sister, for four years before I ever walked into that garage with a cold chicken and no idea what I was about to be handed too.
I just knew that he had grease on his jaw and he’d fixed my brother’s bike for free and he had a way of almost smiling that made me want to see the whole thing. I knew that when he talked to Marcus he didn’t talk down to him, the way most adults his age did to a twenty two year old with more debt than sense. I knew that the garage, for all its clutter, was organized in a way that only made sense if you’d built the system yourself and trusted no one else to touch it. I knew that he’d noticed the chicken in my hands and hadn’t said anything about it, which somehow felt like its own kind of manners.
“I’m Mira,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Marcus talks about you a lot. Come by Saturday if you want to make sure he actually learns the oil thing. I’ll have coffee on.”
“You always bribe people with coffee?”
“Only the ones I want to come back.”
He said it plainly, without any weight on it, already turning back toward the bike like the sentence hadn’t cost him anything, but I saw the tips of his ears go a little red, and I understood, standing there with a cooling chicken in a plastic bag, that I had just watched a man say something true by accident and immediately regret it.
I did not go by Saturday to make sure Marcus learned anything.
I went by Saturday because I wanted the whole smile, and some part of me, some very quiet, very early part of me, the part that notices things before you’re ready to know you’ve noticed them already understood that I was going to get a lot more than that.
I just didn’t know yet what it was going to cost.
