She opened the store at eight and put a new sign in the window. It did not mention the machinery pool. It read MORGAN REPAIR SERVICE: PUMPS, SMALL ENGINES, MOWERS, HITCHES, WELDING. The lettering was crooked, and the paper curled a little where the tape met the glass. By nine, a tractor with a bad starter sat beside the loading dock. By ten, somebody had left a mower with a broken cable and promised to return Friday.
For the first time since buying the building, Rachel was too busy working to wonder whether she had made a mistake. Yet every time the screen door chimed, she glanced toward the counter before she looked at the customer. The habit developed so quickly that she barely noticed it. She was waiting to see whether another small brass key would appear.
The rain began in earnest the following Tuesday. It came first as a fine gray mist that softened the edges of the grain elevator and left tiny beads on the feed store windows. By nightfall it was a steady drumming on the metal roof, and by the end of the week the ditches were full enough to carry leaves and corn stalks from one field to another. Rachel had lived in northern Missouri all her life, but she still found the speed with which useful farmland could become impassable remarkable.
Customers brought in machines they could not use until the weather changed. A mower arrived with its blade wrapped in a blanket so the sharp edge wouldn't catch on the pickup's upholstery. A contractor hauled in a pump that had been left too long in a flooded excavation. Three farmers delivered small engines on the same afternoon, each saying that if the ground ever dried out, he was going to need the machine back immediately.
Rachel worked beneath bright fluorescent tubes that buzzed faintly even when the building was otherwise silent. By the second week, the old counter had become a shelf for invoices, parts catalogs, lunch sacks, and the occasional oil filter. She had moved her father's vise to a heavy bench near the loading dock and mounted it with four new bolts, measuring twice before she tightened each one. Every time she used it, she felt the same mixture of comfort and loss.
She used to be able to send her father a machine she couldn't understand, and it would come back with the problem identified and a penciled note explaining why. Now she did that for herself. She kept a small pad at the bench, writing down what she'd found and what still troubled her before she quit for the night. She couldn't have said exactly when the pad had become a substitute for talking to him, but it helped.
Earl appeared twice during the rainy stretch, once to buy bolts she didn't sell and once, he admitted, simply to get out of his house. He always checked the pegboard before speaking. When he saw six still hanging there, his face eased a fraction, although he never asked Rachel to prepare it. She knew he was waiting for the fertilizer spreader, and she knew there were probably other people waiting too.