Caleb knew every total because he had written them down in a black notebook and carried it in his back pocket. He knew which supplier had frozen their account and which one still answered his calls out of respect for Aaron. He knew how much the electric company wanted before Friday and exactly how little remained in the business checking account. He had become skilled at measuring impossible distances between two numbers without ever confusing that skill for a solution.
The bank's representative, a woman named Ms. Alvarez, had been more patient than Caleb thought he deserved. She had explained the difference between Aaron's business obligations and the estate's liabilities, and she had urged Caleb to get proper advice before signing anything in his own name. But she had also been clear that the shop property secured a loan and that patience did not create payments. Caleb was not legally responsible for every bill his uncle had left behind, yet if he wanted to keep the shop operating, he would have to find a way to settle the obligations attached to it.
He wanted to keep it more than he wanted anything he had ever wanted in his life. That was what frightened him, because wanting a thing did not make it possible to hold on to. Oildale Customs was the only place where he could picture his future without having to invent a new person to live it. Every drawer, every oil stain, every faded mark on the floor had been part of his education, and the idea of walking away felt less like losing a business than like abandoning the last conversation he had been having with his uncle.
Aaron Mercer had not been Caleb's father, although most people who met them assumed otherwise. Caleb's mother had died when he was young, and his father had drifted out of contact so gradually that there was no single day Caleb could name as the day he left. Aaron, his mother's older brother, had taken him in with a gruff declaration that the spare bedroom was better than any arrangement the county might find. It was not a speech about sacrifice. It was Aaron saying, 'There's cereal in the cupboard, the dog bites strangers, and school starts at eight.'
The dog had been an old shepherd mix named Gus, whose bite never amounted to more than a disappointed bark. The cereal was often stale, the spare room smelled of engine parts until Aaron cleared it, and nobody in the little house had much experience being responsible for a grieving child. But Aaron woke Caleb for school, attended parent conferences in work clothes, learned how to make decent spaghetti, and sat beside him through nights when the boy wanted to know why people disappeared. By the time Caleb turned thirteen, the word uncle had become too small to describe what Aaron was.