She stared at him. Then she looked down at the coins resting between her fingers, as if she had never heard adulthood described as something that might require less of her instead of more. She returned the money to her pocket and picked up the bag. At the doorway, she looked back.
"Will you really be here tomorrow?"
Ray thought of his brother's unanswered call. "The shop opens at eight. If you and your mom need me, that's where I'll be."
"You promise?"
He did not answer quickly. He wanted the words to weigh what they ought to weigh, to be more than something people said because it was easy. At last he nodded.
"I promise I'll be there."
The repair shop opened at eight on weekdays, but Ray arrived an hour early that Saturday. It stood behind a service station on the edge of town, a long brick building with two garage bays, a small office, and a faded sign that still read MERCER MOTORCYCLE AND REPAIR in letters he had painted himself. The equipment was old, kept useful through patience rather than money, and everything had a designated place. His younger mechanic had joked that Ray would probably label the rain if he could find a box large enough to store it. Ray said the joke was inaccurate because he did not believe in organizing things he could not fix.
He unlocked the front door and switched on the lights one row at a time. A partially restored touring motorcycle occupied the nearest lift, surrounded by trays of screws, replacement gaskets, and neatly arranged parts. Two customer bikes waited beside the far wall, one with a damaged clutch and the other with an intermittent electrical fault that had already driven its owner to three different shops. The radio near the workbench offered a weather forecast and then dissolved into static. Ray shut it off, made coffee, and wrote the day's appointments on a whiteboard.
Around nine, he heard two light knocks against the glass of the office door. Lily stood outside with a paper bag in one hand and the business card in the other. The bag was folded neatly at the top, and she carried it with the same careful concentration he had seen in the alley. Ray opened the door and stepped aside so she could see the workshop without being forced to enter.
"Morning," he said. "How's your mother?"
"She ate the soup."
"Good."
"She wants to know why you're doing this."
"She can ask me."
Lily looked down at her shoes. "She says people don't give away food like that."
Ray thought about the number of meals he had paid for over the years and forgotten by the following day. He thought about his mother, who had always put another plate on the table when a neighbor appeared at the back door. Generosity was neither rare nor complicated, he decided, but sometimes the world made it feel dangerous. He crouched near a stool so that Lily would not have to crane her neck to speak with him.