"Good," Ethan said. "That's good." He took a moment to place her face into the ordinary Saturday setting. "I didn't expect to see you again so soon." "Neither did I," Victoria admitted. "But I decided that waiting to say thank you would make it too easy to forget how much it mattered."
Inside the office, Lily looked up from her assignment with undisguised interest. Ethan introduced them, and Lily immediately asked whether Victoria was the lady whose car her father had rescued in the rain. Victoria crouched a little so they could speak at the same level. "I'm afraid that's me," she said. "Your dad was very good at knowing what to do."
"He always knows," Lily replied. "Except when we're trying to find the television remote. Then he has no idea." Ethan pretended to take offense while Victoria laughed, genuinely and without the guarded courtesy she used at business lunches. The sound surprised her almost as much as the garage itself.
She looked around the office with a kind of attention she usually reserved for acquisition targets. The appointment board was handwritten, and beside each customer's name Ethan had recorded the promised work and a realistic completion time. The waiting chairs were old but clean; a jar of candy stood on a shelf low enough for children to reach; and a framed photograph behind the desk showed a younger Ethan standing beside his father in front of the same garage. Beyond the doorway, the hydraulic lift on the left was marked out of service, and a bucket stood beneath a dark stain on the ceiling.
What struck her most was not the poverty of the place but its careful maintenance despite that poverty. Tools hung in labeled outlines, used parts were separated for disposal, and work orders were clipped to the correct jobs rather than stacked in an anonymous pile. Nothing about the shop looked careless. Much of it looked like a business whose owner had been forced to spend every available dollar on necessities instead of appearances.
"Would you like coffee?" Ethan asked. "It's not very good." "I've had worse in much more expensive rooms," Victoria told him. He poured her a cup and found a clean paper sleeve because the handle of the remaining mug had broken the previous month. When he turned back, she was reading Lily's drawing.
"Your father looks very impressive in that cape," Victoria said. Lily considered the picture with a critical eye. "He should have a bigger wrench. I ran out of room." Victoria glanced at Ethan. "I suspect he manages with the one he has."
They talked for several minutes about the highway, the cooling system, and how long Ethan had been operating the garage. He told her about Frank, the early days, and his decision to keep the original name when he inherited the place. Victoria learned that Ethan was thirty-eight, that he had one daughter, and that his wife had died four years before. He offered those facts plainly, without using them to make his circumstances sound more deserving of sympathy.