At the care facility that afternoon, Henry noticed her mood immediately. He was sitting beside the window with his walking aid placed just out of reach, a positioning choice she corrected before sitting down. “Something happened,” he said.
“Several things happen every day.”
“Don't talk to me like I'm one of your vendors. You sound lighter.”
She folded her coat over the chair. “The shop's doing well.”
“The shop, is it?”
“Yes, Dad, the shop.”
Henry looked unconvinced, but he didn't press. He asked whether the owner knew how to repair a small gasoline engine, and Claire promised to ask, even though she suspected it was only an excuse to see what sort of man Ethan was. She had not planned to involve her father in her working life, but neither had she planned for her working life to make him curious. That night she caught herself looking forward to the next morning. It was a quiet, unfamiliar pleasure.
The month after that brought the first serious opportunity to change the scale of Walker Auto Repair. A regional transportation owner named Gerald Pratt called asking about maintenance arrangements for a mixed fleet of twelve vehicles. He had been referred by another customer, a delivery supervisor whose trucks Ethan had kept running during an especially difficult winter. Claire asked for the vehicles' make, model, mileage, and service history before offering a meeting. Gerald sounded amused that an auto shop receptionist wanted records. “I just need a mechanic who can keep us on the road,” he said.
“You need predictable maintenance costs and less downtime,” she replied. “The more I know before you arrive, the better the proposal will be.”
He sent the records. Claire cross-referenced them with manufacturers' schedules, found three vehicles overdue for major service, and drafted a cost and scheduling analysis that gave the company options instead of a single large number. She looked up public information about the company's expansion plans and prepared a preliminary service structure for twelve vehicles with room to add more. Ethan examined the draft and asked several questions. By the end of the afternoon he was convinced they could provide the work, though he admitted he'd never signed a fleet agreement of that size.
“Then we need to make sure we can deliver what we promise,” Claire said. “I won't sell him capacity we don't have.”
“What if the deal's too big for us?”
“Then we tell him what we can do, and we price the rest honestly.”
Ethan nodded. It wasn't the answer of someone trying to impress him; it was the answer of someone trying to protect the business both of them worked for. They revised the proposed service windows, built contingencies for parts delays, and confirmed which vehicles could be scheduled without displacing long-standing customers. Claire typed the final version while Ethan returned to the garage, where he tested a truck's steering after an alignment. Each was doing the work the other had learned to trust.