At eleven, he found himself holding Ray’s old pocket notebook. Its pages contained torque figures, part numbers, odd observations, and reminders written in the shorthand of a man who expected the machinery of his world to remain familiar. One line near the back had been underlined twice: Never mistake the symptom for the cause. Caleb ran his thumb over the indentation the pencil had left in the paper. He could almost hear Ray telling him to put it away and get back to work.
At twelve-thirty, the telephone rang. It was a bank employee named Sandra Bell, not the loan officer who had originally handled Ray’s account but a woman assigned to troubled small-business borrowers. Her voice was tired and careful, the voice of someone who spent most days delivering news people did not want to hear. She explained that the bank had received no payment toward the arrears and that the deadline in the notice was still in effect. Caleb asked for another two weeks and heard her hesitate before saying she could not authorize it without money on the account.
“How much would it take to stop the filing?” he asked.
She gave him a figure precise enough to hurt: seven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars, including fees and past-due installments. It was not the whole debt, only what he needed to bring the account current. Another thousand and change would keep the lights on, satisfy the supplier’s minimum payment, and cover insurance long enough for him to earn again. Caleb wrote the numbers in a column on a yellow legal pad and added them three times. All three answers were nearly the same as what the shop had grossed in its worst four months combined.
“I’m not trying to make this personal,” Sandra said. “I knew your uncle. I’m sorry about him.”
“I know,” Caleb answered. “That doesn’t change the number.”
“No,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
He put down the receiver and watched dust float through a strip of sunlight. For a few minutes he considered calling the salvage yard to ask what they would pay for the old equipment. Selling the compressor and the engine hoist might cover a payment, but without them he would have no business left to save. He considered taking a job at the dealership in Bakersfield and handing the keys back to the bank. He considered those possibilities every day, and each day they felt a little less impossible.
Just after one o’clock, a motorcycle rolled into the yard. Caleb recognized the sound before he looked up: an old, uneven idle, deep and heavy, with an exhaust note no modern machine could convincingly imitate. Then came a second motorcycle and a third, quieter at first as they settled outside the gate. The lead rider approached slowly, as though he wanted the building to know he was coming. Caleb put his pencil down without finishing the number he had started.