inspected the mounts and verified that nothing else was damaged. The customer was a man who needed the truck for deliveries and seemed genuinely startled when Willa showed him the old bracket and explained the repair without talking down to him. He thanked her twice and told Fig at the counter that they ought to keep that new mechanic.
Sark was harder to impress than customers. He taught her the shop's tool-control rules with the seriousness of a man conducting an examination, then gave her a diagnosis on a bike that had an intermittent electrical problem. She spent most of an afternoon tracing the symptoms and asking questions he clearly considered unnecessary. When she finally found the fault, he crossed his arms and asked why she had checked three simple possibilities before moving to the expensive part he had suspected.
"Because if the cheap thing is wrong, replacing the expensive thing doesn't fix it," Willa replied.
"And if the expensive thing is wrong?"
"Then the cheap checks have still told us something." She held out the inspection sheet. "Do you want the results, or do you want to argue about the order?"
Sark took the sheet, tried not to smile, and failed. Later he told Fig that the girl was going to be trouble, although he had already begun saving her the more complicated diagnostic tickets. Fig replied that a garage with no trouble in it usually had no good mechanics either. Sark accepted this as a personal compliment.
Brody was the first person who spoke to Willa without treating her history as a question waiting to be asked. He was twenty-eight, with a nervous laugh, careful hands, and an old injury in his left knee that bothered him when the weather changed. He had been at the garage since leaving a manufacturing job that paid more but made him feel as though he were disappearing by inches. He was proud of being able to rebuild a carburetor without looking at a diagram, and quietly relieved when Willa turned out to be able to do the same.
They started sharing a workbench because their tools tended to stay in orderly places. He told her which customers insisted on watching their repairs and which ones brought food when their vehicles were ready. She learned that he had a mother in Sudbury, a younger sister studying nursing, and an unreasonable devotion to a terrible local hockey team. In return, she told him that she preferred tea to coffee, had once rebuilt a motorcycle starter at a roadside campground, and could not stand the smell of cinnamon-scented air fresheners. It was not an autobiography, but for Willa it was a beginning.
Fig was slower to make a place for her, though his reserve had a different shape. He never asked why she checked the windows before leaving a room or why a raised male voice at the counter made her go still. Instead, when a customer lost his temper over a delayed