That night she put the key on the windowsill and watched it until the room went dark. It had been so long since she had possessed a key that no one could take back at the end of a shift or after a disagreement. She had one photograph with her, folded inside her notebook, of her father leaning across the fender of a truck with a pencil behind his ear. She set it beside the key, then went to sleep with her boots by the door rather than on her feet. In the morning she woke early enough to watch the baker unloading flour from a van, and for a moment the movement of a working person beginning an ordinary day made her unexpectedly homesick.
Her father's shop had been called Deacon Auto and Cycle. It had occupied a narrow brick building on the west side of West Haven, where the houses became warehouses and the old railway spur ended behind a chain-link fence. Grant Deacon had opened it with one borrowed lift and the kind of optimism that can survive on very little sleep. Willa had grown up on the smell of brake cleaner and the sound of her father speaking to customers with a respect he never reserved for the people who spent the most money.
He remembered the names of their children and which trucks belonged to the farmers who needed them for work. He would tell customers when a repair could safely wait, even when he had bills coming due, because he believed that making a person trust you once was more valuable than selling them something they did not need. When Willa was twelve, he gave her a ruined lawnmower engine and a milk crate of parts and told her not to ask for the answer until she had understood the question. She spent three weekends taking it apart and a fourth putting it back together incorrectly. He was patient through every mistake except the ones she tried to hide.
"An engine doesn't care whether you're embarrassed," he used to tell her. "It cares whether you checked the thing that needed checking." She had hated the lesson when she was small, particularly the occasions when he made her repeat a measurement she had already decided was correct. Now she could hear him saying it every time she opened a service record at Northern Shields. She was not trying to become her father. She was trying to keep the part of him that had taught her how to see.
Harlon Neil had appeared in the Deacon shop when Willa was sixteen, wearing pressed shirts and carrying an expensive phone that never seemed to stop ringing. He had supplied the money for an expanded service area and the computer systems Grant had been putting off buying. He was charming to customers,