Arguments came anyway. Some customers arrived and asked whether the owner was around while looking directly at her. Others asked who would be doing the actual repairs, as if the dark grease beneath her fingernails were decorative. An equipment dealer once told her she had a gift for customer relations and should consider putting a man on the tools so she could concentrate on scheduling. Martha had smiled politely and repaired the man's hydraulic problem in forty-five minutes. He never apologized. He did, however, come back three more times and quietly ask for her by name.
The shop had been busy enough through spring. By midsummer, too many farmers were postponing nonessential work, waiting for crop prices to improve or interest rates to ease. Two large service accounts had gone to a regional dealer offering financing Martha could not match. A third customer had promised to settle a fourteen-hundred-dollar invoice after harvest, which was reasonable for him and disastrous for her. The compressor needed servicing. Her service truck needed tires. The shop insurance renewal had risen again, and the person at the bank who called these things routine had never had to choose which necessary bill could safely wait another week.
She could have gone back to a dealership. That possibility sat in the corner of her thinking like an unwanted visitor. At thirty, she had ten years of professional experience, factory training on several equipment lines, and the kind of practical knowledge that came only from working beside farmers who expected their machinery to run because crops did not wait for an appointment. A dealer in Waterloo had offered her a steady salary with health insurance. The same manager who made the offer called her sweetheart twice during the interview and asked whether she intended to have children soon. She had turned down the job, then spent an entire week wondering whether pride was an acceptable substitute for dental coverage.
Her father, Leonard Sullivan, had taught her the trade in a small shop behind the family house, where she learned to identify tools before she could drive. He had not been sentimental about machinery. A combine, he said, was not beautiful because of its paint or its name. It was beautiful when it did the work it had been built to do and returned its operator home safely. When Martha was thirteen, he made her repeat that last part after a neighbor lost two fingers clearing a machine while it was running. She remembered the lesson every time someone urged her to hurry and skip a check. Leonard had died of cancer five years earlier, leaving Martha his tools, an uneven collection of manuals, and a warning that being stubborn would only help if she remained willing to learn.
She had kept all three. She also kept his old canvas tool roll in the service truck, although newer tools had replaced most of its contents. On difficult mornings, she would unroll it simply to remember that she belonged to a lineage of people who solved ordinary problems carefully. He would not have approved of her staying awake over invoices. He would have approved of her doing the work right even when a customer tried to rush her. She wished, more often than she admitted, that he were still alive to tell her whether she was being foolish to attempt the next thing she had in mind.