"Yes," I admitted.
"That's all right," she said. "Just don't let being angry with Floyd become the reason we keep going. We need the tractor for the farm, not to win an argument."
She was right, and I hated how often she was right. It would have been easier to turn Floyd into a villain and myself into the hero of a battle. Instead I had to return to the notebook, record the offer, and accept that he might one day prove correct. Repair work did not become safer or cheaper because a man at an auction had laughed at me.
Two days later, Mr. Pittman told me the injection shop had called. The pump was repairable, the report said, though it needed more work than we'd hoped. The discounted cost still fit within the project's remaining support, provided no new major failures appeared. Mr. Pittman handed me the written assessment so I could file it myself.
"Does that mean it'll run?" I asked.
"No," he answered. "It means we have another reason to try."
By then I had learned to recognize the difference. Another reason to try was not a guarantee, but it was real. I taped the assessment into the notebook and turned the page. Week eight began with the first glimpse of a repaired engine instead of a dismantled puzzle, and our deadline for the first controlled start was no longer a vague point somewhere beyond Christmas.
December arrived with a brittle kind of cold that made the boards of the farmhouse creak before anyone touched them. The orchard beyond the lower field had lost its leaves, and mornings began with a white edge of frost along the fence wire. The John Deere sat in the machine shed beneath two hanging lamps, its hood still off and its engine no longer looking like something the weather had forgotten. A neat line of labeled containers stood on the workbench where tangled parts had once filled cardboard boxes. When I walked in after school, I could smell fresh oil and clean metal instead of the stale dampness that had greeted us the first day.
The injection pump returned during the ninth week with a written test report and a tag bearing the shop's name. Mr. Pittman read every line before allowing it anywhere near the engine. Grandma came down to the shed to watch us check the paperwork. I held the tag under the light as though it were an award. It wasn't an award; it was proof that a critical component had passed a professional evaluation we could never have performed in our own workshop.
"Do you know what the most expensive part of that report is?" Mr. Pittman asked.
"The shop bill?" I guessed.
"The sentence where a person with the right equipment takes responsibility for what they tested."