I laughed because I could hear him saying every word. Mr. Atwood offered to bring scrap boards to make a safer working surface in the shed and reminded me not to climb over the tractor while it was unsupported or being moved. I nodded, then asked if he'd help us cover the exhaust until we could inspect the engine. He found a suitable temporary cover and fixed it in place. It was the first repair we made, if you could call it a repair, and it cost nothing more than a little attention.
That evening I opened Grandpa's manual on the kitchen table and started a new notebook. The first page read, "Price Farm 4020 Restoration," followed by the date and the auction price. Underneath I drew three columns: confirmed, possible, unknown. The confirmed column was painfully short. The possible column was crowded. The unknown column took up most of the page.
Grandma brought me cocoa and looked over my shoulder. "That's a lot of unknowns," she said.
"I know."
"You seem happy about it."
I thought before answering. "I think it means we still have things we can find out."
She touched my hair, the way she had when I was smaller. "Just remember that finding out may mean the answer is no."
At school Monday I couldn't concentrate on fractions, which was unfortunate because we were working on the kind involving decimals and remainders. My teacher, Mrs. Calder, caught me drawing a sectional view of a cylinder sleeve in the margin of my worksheet. Instead of scolding me immediately, she asked whether I understood that measuring an engine correctly involved the same arithmetic I was trying to avoid. By the end of lunch I had agreed to finish the assignment and she had agreed to look at my project journal.
After classes Grandma picked me up outside the gym, and we drove to the county office in the brick municipal building on Main Street. James had a small room upstairs with a map of local farms pinned to one wall and photographs of youth livestock projects on another. His desk was crowded with forms, but the chair opposite it was empty, and he pulled a second one closer so Grandma and I could sit together. He remembered our names without checking his notes. That alone made the office feel different from the places where adults usually spoke over me.
I placed my journal on his desk. He turned the pages slowly, pausing at the auction receipt and the three-column list. When he reached Grandpa's penciled diagrams copied into my own notebook, he asked whether I wanted to become a mechanic when I grew up. I said I wasn't sure. I just wanted Grandma to have a working tractor and the farm not to disappear.
James closed the journal gently. "That's a good reason to begin," he said. "It's also a reason to be very careful. A project like this can become a burden if everyone starts treating a child's hope as a guarantee."