a glass jar by her bed, so Marcus trimmed their stems with kitchen scissors and found a jar that used to contain peach preserves. That evening she asked him if he had really helped repair the machine at the tower, and he answered with the same careful honesty he had used with Natalie.
"I helped them ask a better question," he said. "The people who were responsible for it did the work and made sure it was safe." Emma considered that, spoon hovering above her plate. "That's kind of like our science groups," she said.
"One person thinks of the test, but everybody gets to show how it works." Marcus smiled. "That's exactly right."
Then she surprised him by asking whether he missed being a repairman. For a moment he looked at the countertop, at the small chip near the stove knob, and at the screw he had been meaning to tighten on the chair across from him. It was easy to answer questions about what a man did; it was harder to answer questions about the part of himself he had placed on a shelf and tried to stop reaching for.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "I liked finding out why things stopped working. I liked making something useful again." Emma lowered her spoon.
"You still do that," she said. "You fixed the lamp in my room. And my backpack zipper. And the chair at Mrs. Price's."
Marcus laughed softly. "That's true. Maybe I never stopped being one."
After dinner, while Emma completed her reading homework, Marcus unfolded an old resume from the bottom drawer of his desk. It was three pages long, printed when he still believed every opening required a fresh list of achievements. It described diagnostic work on commercial laundry equipment, cooling controllers, pump systems, and small industrial power supplies. There were training courses he had completed years earlier and a certificate that had since expired because he could not afford the renewal and had no reason to use it.
He had worked at Hartley Equipment Service from the time he was twenty-four until the spring after Emma's fourth birthday. His supervisor there, Warren Cole, had taught him to use an old analog meter before giving him a digital one, insisting that a technician should understand what a measurement meant before learning to trust a display. Marcus had started by carrying tool cases and taking notes. By the time he left, he could find intermittent faults that sent more experienced technicians into a cycle of replacing expensive parts and hoping for the best.
The job had once given him a future he could describe without embarrassment. He and his wife, Lena, had talked about buying a modest house with a garage, and Marcus imagined teaching Emma how to use the workbench when she was old enough to be interested. But their marriage had already been struggling in ways neither of them knew how to repair. When Lena left, Emma was small enough to need someone with her every morning and every evening, and the repair company could not promise Marcus would be available at either time.