He laughed, unexpectedly and completely. It was the first good sound of the day. While she ate, he packed half a peanut-butter sandwich, apple slices cut into moons, and a little note tucked into the lunch bag. The note said, BE KIND.
BE BRAVE. ASK A GOOD QUESTION. He had started writing those after Grace died, on mornings when words felt safer on paper than in his throat. Emma saved them in a shoebox beneath her bed.
At the bus stop, the air smelled of wet leaves and the first cold front of autumn. Caleb wore a jacket with a broken zipper and kept his hands deep in the pockets. The pavement was cracked enough that Emma had invented a game of stepping over the widest lines. Across the street, Mrs. Diane Parker was watering the little pots outside her porch, a stubborn act considering the weather. She had lived on the block for thirty-two years and had watched Emma three afternoons a week since Caleb started taking rush work from a charter operator two counties away.
"You working late today?" she called.
"Trying not to," he replied. "Got a delivery at the airport. Might turn into more."
"Don't let the airport people talk down to you again."
"I wasn't planning to invite them to."
Mrs. Parker shook her head. "You don't invite people to treat you badly. They bring it with them. You just get to decide what you do after."
Emma tugged on Caleb's sleeve. "What's the rule?"
He crouched. "You tell me."
"Be kind, be brave, and if somebody's sitting alone, sit with them." She kissed his cheek and climbed into the bus, then ran back to the front window to wave a second time. He watched until the yellow shape had turned the corner, because some part of him still worried that love could disappear between one ordinary moment and the next.
His truck had passed two hundred and ten thousand miles. The check-engine light had been on for a month; a diagnostic had traced it to a sensor that could safely wait, though Caleb did not like the principle of waiting. The passenger-side window required a firm shove before it sealed. The heater only delivered warm air if he gave it time. In the bed sat a rust-spotted steel toolbox, its latch held shut by a faded bungee cord.
The toolbox had belonged to Marcus Richardson, Caleb's father. Marcus had been an aircraft technician for twenty-two years, first on military transports and then on civilian contracts. He had never completed a college degree, and the practical certificates he carried had always been treated as less impressive than the diplomas of people whose mistakes he spent his evenings correcting. He had taught Caleb that machines did not respond to prestige. They responded to the laws of physics, the discipline of observation, and an unwillingness to sign your name beneath work you had not checked.