At ten, his friend Lena Ortiz arrived in a dusty pickup with two breakfast burritos wrapped in foil. Lena was twenty, worked part-time at a tire shop, and had grown up three streets from Caleb. She had been helping at Oildale Customs since Aaron's death, sometimes taking calls or running errands, though she refused to let Caleb call her an employee because he could not pay her reliably. She pushed a burrito into his hand and surveyed the empty bay.
'You look like you lost a fight with your own office,' she said. 'Did you sleep here again?'
'It's cooler than my place,' Caleb replied.
'Your place has a window air conditioner. This place has a fan that sounds like it's trying to escape.' She nodded toward the envelope. 'More good news?'
Caleb didn't answer, and Lena knew enough not to ask twice. They ate standing beside the lift, the foil warm in their hands, while sunlight came through the high windows and drew pale rectangles across the floor. She told him about a customer who had arrived at the tire shop claiming he needed a replacement because he had somehow driven his truck over his own mailbox. Caleb laughed in spite of himself, and for a few seconds the building sounded as it had before Aaron died.
Lena watched the laugh fade. 'I've got a cousin in Sacramento who can get you a job at a restoration shop,' she said carefully. 'You'd be working on vintage bikes all day. Real benefits. Regular hours. You wouldn't have to keep begging this building to pay its bills.'
'I know.'
'You keep saying that like it ends the conversation.'
'I'm not ready to go.'
She looked around at the shelves, the workbench, the uneven lettering on the sign visible through the open door. 'Then don't go yet,' she said. 'But give yourself a date when you'll decide. Aaron would have hated seeing you turn loyalty into a punishment.'
Caleb wanted to argue, but he knew she was right about one thing. Aaron had been stubborn, sometimes painfully so, yet he had never wanted Caleb to inherit suffering as if it were a family heirloom. Still, the prospect of leaving hurt worse than the bank's letters. He folded the empty foil into a square, dropped it into the trash, and returned to cleaning a carburetor he had already cleaned twice.
Just after noon, Lena drove back to work and the heat settled over the industrial park. A freight train moved somewhere beyond the warehouses, its horn drifting low across the fields. The garage grew quiet enough for Caleb to hear the ticking of a wall clock whose face had yellowed with age. He was considering closing early to visit the bank when a different sound began coming down the dead-end street.