"You still think you might buy another bunch of engines?"
"Only after I understand what I'm looking at. I'm not doing this just to prove I can haul junk home."
Carter grinned and walked away. Noah watched him go, surprised by how little the old joke mattered now. He had wanted the boys at school to stop laughing in the first weeks after the auction, but the business had changed his priorities. Their opinion was no longer the measure by which he judged a completed day.
Ms. Porter came to stand beside the table. She had listened from the back while Noah answered questions and had noticed how often he explained a limitation before naming a possible solution. "You sound more like a technician than you did at the start of the semester," she said.
"I feel like I know less," Noah admitted.
"That's often a sign you're seeing more of the problem."
He considered that on the drive home with Rachel. Before the auction, he had pictured experienced mechanics as people who carried complete answers in their heads and needed only a wrench to prove them. After months of actual work, he understood that experience was partly the ability to recognize how many things could go wrong and investigate them in a sensible order. His grandfather had not been remarkable because every machine obeyed him; he had been remarkable because he could remain patient when it did not.
A more direct opportunity arrived from Rebecca in early December. The cooperative was reorganizing its reserve parts storage for older equipment and wanted help creating a verified cross-reference catalog. The work would involve identifying neglected components, comparing them with service references, and flagging anything whose condition or compatibility could not be established. It was less exciting than repairing an engine, but Rebecca thought Noah's method suited the project.
She offered a part-time arrangement supervised by the cooperative's maintenance team, with hours organized around school. Rachel reviewed the terms and the necessary paperwork before agreeing. Noah accepted because the work would expose him to more equipment families and better reference materials than he could afford to collect independently. The cooperative was not making him a master mechanic; it was giving him a place to learn under people who understood the consequences of getting the details wrong.
On his first afternoon in the parts room, Noah found shelves crowded with boxes whose labels had faded until different revisions looked identical. He spent several hours matching surviving manufacturer numbers to purchase records, and he marked several items for review after discovering that the original inventory descriptions were too broad. An older maintenance supervisor watched him work and eventually brought a small tray of mixed fasteners to the table. "What would you do with these?" he asked.
Noah examined the tray. "Separate and identify them. Anything I couldn't verify stays out of service inventory until someone can."
"Even if one looks exactly like the right thing?"
"Especially then," Noah said. "That's when it's easiest to convince yourself."