Patrick never let the boy mistake confidence for knowledge. If an engine would not start, he made Leo describe what he could hear, smell, and see before touching a tool. If a bolt resisted, he made him stop and ask whether he had misunderstood the problem. If a customer arrived ashamed of a repair that had gone badly, Patrick would say, 'Machines don't care whether you're embarrassed. They care whether you're willing to find the truth.'
Leo remembered the words because they were among the few things death had not managed to take from him. Patrick died when Leo was ten, after an illness that first looked like an ordinary infection and then became something the doctors could not control. His mother tried to keep their apartment and the shop going, but she had never been the one customers called when a transmission failed. Grief swallowed her time, unpaid bills swallowed their savings, and within two years Leo had begun moving through other people's houses with his belongings in plastic bags.
His mother was still alive somewhere, as far as he knew. That uncertainty was part of the injury. The last time he had spoken to her, she had promised to call the following week. By the time a month passed, he stopped mentioning it to the adults who asked how he was adjusting. He had learned that asking questions about promises often made the promises disappear faster.
The Dawson house in Flagstaff had been his fourth placement. Its front lawn was always cut, its porch light always working, and its refrigerator carefully arranged before scheduled visits from state workers. Hank Dawson appeared in photographs with a broad smile and a hand resting on the shoulder of a child who would not dare move. He talked about discipline, responsibility, and the importance of teaching boys to work. When there were visitors, he called Leo 'son' and laughed at his own jokes. When the door closed, he spoke in the clipped tone of a man calculating how much labor a meal ought to purchase.
Hank had two other foster children in the house, a twelve-year-old boy named Jaden and a fourteen-year-old girl named Mia. Leo was the oldest, which meant the hardest jobs came to him first. He mowed lawns for people who paid Hank in cash, repaired damaged fences after school, washed trucks behind a garage, and helped carry heavy boxes for a friend of Hank's who sold used appliances. Hank called it character building. Leo recognized it as work that never put money in his own pocket.
At first he tried to argue with the ordinary facts of the arrangement. He asked where the money went and why the refrigerator stayed locked when Hank went out for the night. He asked why Mia was forbidden to call her caseworker without Hank listening and why Jaden came to breakfast frightened of making noise. Each question led to punishment, and every punishment taught the younger children to look away when Leo entered a room with a swollen lip or a new bruise.