"They probably have special pancakes," she had said. "Like the kind that don't drop crumbs into the controls."
"That sounds like a very important engineering problem," Jack replied, flipping another pancake onto a plate. "Maybe NASA should hire you."
"They can't. I'm eight." She thought about that for a moment. "Unless they need somebody to test the snacks."
Jack laughed and slid the plate in front of her. His daughter had been unusually tired that week after recovering from what the urgent-care clinic called a likely viral illness. The fever had disappeared, and the coughing was better, but she had stopped racing him from the kitchen to the porch each morning. She had said climbing the stairs made her feel funny, a complaint he had first attributed to the lingering effects of being sick. Parents were supposed to notice things, and Jack noticed almost everything about Lily, but even attentive parents did not always know what ordinary childhood symptoms were trying to become.
He owned a small repair shop on the edge of Mill Creek, a working-class town west of Chicago, where people brought him lawn tractors, commercial refrigerators, old generators, and the sorts of household appliances that chain stores would rather replace than fix. The sign above the garage read MERCER REPAIR AND TOOL in faded blue letters. His father had painted it twenty-three years earlier, when Jack was seventeen and certain he would spend his life someplace bigger.
Instead, he had spent his life learning how to keep things running. He could listen to an engine and hear a problem before the owner finished describing it. He could bring a seized bearing back into alignment, replace a burnt motor, or rebuild the wiring in a machine whose manufacturer no longer existed. He had two employees on good weeks, one on bad weeks, and a pile of bills that never seemed to shrink no matter how much work came through the door.
The pickup was a dark blue Ford with a dent in the passenger door, a heater that took its time, and a bench seat worn smooth where Lily sat beside him during weekend trips to the hardware store. His wife, Mara, had once called the truck his oldest relationship. Then Mara had died in a highway collision four winters earlier, and Jack had stopped finding jokes about old relationships particularly funny.
Lily remembered her mother in fragments. The smell of orange shampoo, a warm hand guiding hers around the edge of a coloring book, a voice singing off-key while rain struck the kitchen windows. She had been four when Mara died, just old enough to remember what was missing and too young to understand why everybody told her the memories would get easier. Jack had never tried to replace Mara's presence with explanations. He kept her photographs on the mantel, told stories when Lily asked, and learned to braid hair badly enough that his daughter finally demanded lessons from their neighbor.