“Shut up with that Mikey shit, Dot.”
“Boy, don’t call me that or I’ll make you wish—”
“Stop.” Rafe’s voice cuts through the squabbling. “We have a guest. Can we please save the discussion of nicknames for later?”
Dorothy rolls her eyes but nods. Mikal turns to me and gives me a look that is clearly meant to be charming or seductive, but is mostly just amusing.
“Sorry, sweetie,” he says, pouting and opening his eyes wide.
“Uh, no problem,” I say. I turn back to Carlos and the twins. “Well, most cars aren’t going to randomly catch on fire or explode.” A few people exhale with relief and I debate whether I should go on. Eh, shit, everyone likes explosions, right? “But it can happen. Sometimes a battery will be defective and it’ll explode, and that looks like the car itself is exploding. When you’re charging your car battery, it releases hydrogen, and if a spark were to ignite the hydrogen, it would definitely explode.
“Or, you know, if you had a gas or oil leak in your car and the fuel dripped onto something really hot, that could cause an explosion too. Oh, and sometimes electrical systems go all weird. They can overheat or short out, which can cause a fire, and that can cause an explosion if the fire hits fuel.”
Everyone is staring at me. Rafe has his right hand protectively on the roof of his car as if it’s going to explode at any moment.
“But, um, those are all really rare occurrences. Really, really rare,” I reassure them. “I’ve never seen it happen and I’ve been a mechanic for almost twenty years.” This seems to put them at ease a little.
“So, what kind of car do you have,” Mikal asks, his tone flirtatious. People always expect that if you’re a mechanic, then you’re going to have some tricked-out showy car, but I’ve never known any mechanic who did.
“A ’93 VW Rabbit,” I say. “Right now.”
They look supremely unimpressed.
“Like, but why?” asks Carlos. “That’s almost as old as Conan’s car. Couldn’t you, like, put together any car you want?”
“Hey, let’s not insult our guest’s car,” Rafe says.
“No, it’s cool,” I say. “Well, most mechanics I know drive junkers. For one thing, people are always offering to sell us crappy cars for really cheap. And when you know what you’re doing, you can fix it up so it runs just fine. So why spend a ton of money when you know you have an endless supply of four-hundred-dollar cars that you can cycle through? Plus, I hate to shatter your illusions, but we don’t make that much money. It’s not like people are giving away their fancy sports cars when they have something wrong with them. So, yeah, mostly, it’s just really easy to have a car I don’t have to worry about.
“That’s how I got my first car, actually. A customer brought in a falling-apart piece of crap and my dad told him it was worth a few bucks as scrap but would cost a fortune to fix, and the guy sold it to him for two hundred dollars. I bought it off my dad and fixed it up.” I painstakingly replaced each busted, rusted-out part in that car, one by one, until it ran as well as anything—hell, better than anything I could’ve afforded. It took almost a year, but had the bonus of familiarizing me with every scrapyard and junk shop in a thirty-block radius.
This seems to have gotten a few of them interested.
“Could we learn to do that?” Gap Model asks.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “It would take a lot of practice, but now there are some really good videos on YouTube of people fixing different parts of cars and stuff.”
“Why don’t we take ten and then meet back here, okay?” Rafe says. The kids wander back into the church. Rafe is so close I can smell him, can feel his warmth at my side.
“Listen,” he says, his voice low. “You’re doing great. Just be careful you don’t promise them anything you won’t follow through with, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most of these kids don’t have people who will spend time teaching them things. So, when they do—look, you just don’t want to make it sound like you’ll be around to help them learn all this stuff if you won’t be. It’s hard for them if they start counting on you to come back and you don’t. They already have a lot of that in their lives. People disappearing. Breaking promises. You know?”
Rafe looks sad, gazing toward the door the kids left through.
“Yeah, I get it.”
He squeezes my biceps and nods.
Mikal is the first one back, and it looks like he’s applied some kind of glittery lip gloss.