When Mrs. Calder returned the assignment, she'd circled one sentence in red: "A good question doesn't prove you're weak; it proves you're still paying attention." She wrote beneath it that Grandpa Earl would have liked that. I put the paper in my restoration journal between the inspection notes and the receipts, where I hoped I'd find it on a day when I was tempted to pretend I knew more than I did.
Christmas came and went quietly. Grandma hung the same handmade ornaments from the kitchen windows that she had put up every year since I could remember. Grandpa's chair remained at the end of the table, empty but no longer pushed away from us as though we were afraid to see it. Mr. Atwood left a basket of oranges on the porch, and Mrs. Bell brought a tin of cookies with a note saying we could keep the tin for nuts and bolts once we'd eaten them. I gave Grandma a framed photograph of Grandpa standing beside the old Case before it broke down. She held it for a long time and put it on the mantel above the stove.
I had no money to buy her a real present. She said the work I was doing mattered more than anything in a store. I told her I still wanted to see the tractor run before New Year's Day. She smiled and said the calendar was not part of the engine. Mr. Pittman would have agreed. I hated that all the adults seemed united against my preferred deadline.
During the final week before our first planned start, a cold rain turned to sleet and coated the lane in a thin shine. Mr. Pittman postponed one session rather than drive his truck on dangerous roads. By the time the weather cleared, the project had reached eleven weeks from the day of the auction. The Saturday selected for the first start dawned blue and bitterly cold, the kind of morning when a person's breath seems to hang in the air after they've stopped speaking.
I had been awake since four, listening to the wind touch the porch roof. Grandma made breakfast, but I couldn't finish it. When Mr. Pittman's pickup arrived at eight, I was already in the machine shed wearing work clothes and holding my notebook so tightly the cover had bent backward. He looked at my face, then at the temperature on the wall thermometer.
"Nervous?" he asked.
"A little."
"Good. Means you're awake."
He and the other adult helpers made the final checks while I stayed in the position they'd assigned me, close enough to observe and far enough from moving parts. Nobody wanted a crowd near the tractor for the attempt, so the shed door was closed except for proper ventilation and the designated observers. James had asked permission to come, but when I explained how nervous I was, he said he'd wait for a message instead. Grandma stood inside the doorway wrapped in Grandpa's old coat, her hands tucked into its deep pockets.