Chapter 4 Warranty
Evelyn's POV
The floor was still tilting when I tried to get a hand under myself. I got maybe four inches up before a boot landed beside my fingers and a hand closed around my shin.
"Don't move."
Julian went down on one knee at my feet like kneeling wasn't worth mentioning, and his palm spread flat over the outside of my ankle, testing. My leg jumped before I told it to and I hissed through my teeth, so he lifted his hand at once and set it back an inch lower, lighter.
"Sorry. I know." He turned his head toward the back of the bay. "Maddie. Box."
Somebody answered and a drawer went. My eyes were watering so badly the overhead light had doubled, and my hands were flat on the concrete and shaking, which was maybe the worst part. Two degrees, fifty-one months of car payments, and I was a puddle on a garage floor over four inches of bad luck.
"Your ankle's blowing up," he said. "I need to feel where it's worst. Through the sock, or..." He stopped, actually stopped, and waited. "Say the word and I don't."
I looked at him properly from the floor, which is not a flattering angle for anybody. One long pale scar ran from his wrist to the inside of his elbow, older than the nicks on his knuckles.
"Fine," I said. "Go."
His thumb pressed above the bone, moved, pressed again, reading the swelling with his hands. He didn't dig. Every time my breath caught he eased off and asked, low, "Here?" and I gave it to him through my teeth, no, there, worse.
By the time Maddie came around the counter with a dented tin, my jaw ached and the anger I'd carried since the diner had gone somewhere I couldn't follow.
"Stool," he said. He got an arm under my shoulder and lifted me with no visible effort, which was its own small humiliation, then sat me down and set my heel on his thigh like the leg belonged there.
The kit was an old cookie tin, red once, with swabs, a spray can, tape and gauze all squared away. He turned my ankle one way, then the other, then ran his thumbs down the top of my foot, and something in my chest went stupid and fast, so I looked at the wall.
"Bones are fine," he said. "Ligament. You'll be purple tomorrow and stupid for a week."
"Stupid."
"You'll walk on it like nothing happened, you'll do it again, and then it's six weeks." He shook the can. "This is cold."
It was. I gripped the bench edge and breathed through it while he wrapped in flat overlapping strips, chin down, lashes hiding whatever was going on behind them.
"Where'd you learn this?"
"Riding, mostly. You get hurt, it happens, so you learn to wrap."
"Yours or somebody else's?"
He didn't answer. He cut the tape, pressed the end down with two fingers, and set my foot back on the floor.
"I'll drive you," he said, snapping the tin shut. "Your car. It's already here and you're in no shape to work the pedals."
The smell of him reached me then, oil and hot metal and something under it. My car has cloth seats, gray, three years old, and it's the only thing that's ever been mine alone.
"No," I said. "I'll get a cab."
He didn't argue, which threw me more than pushing would have. He opened the drawer under the register and came back with a card, thick stock, corners furred from riding in somebody's pocket.
JULIAN VANCE, VANCE MOTO WORKS, and a phone number. No title, no email, no little gold seal.
"Car stays here. It's not eating anything." He stepped back, hands in his pockets. "You need something before then, that's the number."
Four flights at the Ruston Arms, and the bulb on the third landing has been out since April. I went up one step at a time with my hand on the rail, and every time my right foot landed the leg filed a complaint. The apartment smelled like the inside of a wet envelope, the tap dripping, the refrigerator humming like it was thinking about quitting.
I got ice on the ankle and my back against the couch, and I had maybe ninety seconds with my eyes shut before my phone went off against my hip.
"Evelyn. What the hell did you do to that man?"
"Hello, Mom."
"Don't hello me. Owen called me twice. He stood out on that ramp in his good shoes and there was no car and no you, and then he sat in that restaurant until the waitress started giving him looks." Ice hit glass. "He's beside himself."
"I didn't plan it. It was... an accident."
"Then explain it to me."
I pressed the ice harder against my ankle. "Mom. I don't like him."
The quiet that followed was worse than the shouting. "What does that mean, you don't like him."
"I saw him walk in." I turned the bag over on my shin. "He's a bit... more mature than I expected. And I'm only twenty-seven."
"And? He's a professional with a demanding practice."
"He's a man keeping score, and he started before he ever met me."
The lighter clicked twice before it caught. "Do you hear yourself? Turning down a man with a house and a practice because he's no oil painting."
I didn't answer that. It's the trick she's got, and she knows it works.
"Victoria would have smiled and made the best of it," she said. "Victoria would have come home with a second date. That's what a woman does, and one day you'll wake up at forty with nobody to blame but..."
"Mm."
"Don't you mm me."
"I know."
"I lie awake over you, Evelyn. That's the part you never hear."
"I know. I'm in the middle of something."
"Then go. Be in the middle of something." The line clicked, then came back. "This isn't finished."
I set the phone down and sat with my hand still on it while the ice melted through the dish towel. She hadn't always been like this. Before my sister Victoria married, she was a woman who told me not to marry anybody before thirty and sat on the porch with her shoes off while she said it.
That's when she started to change.
The ring, then the gates and the club, then her mouth setting a little harder every year. I pushed back for a long time, and then the thing with my father happened and I stopped.
I emailed the department that night and took three days I couldn't afford. The ankle went purple, then yellow, then down to a dull grudge, and on the fourth morning I taught my eight-thirty with my weight on the podium and walked out the south gate with my coat open.
The Civic was at the curb, and I stopped ten feet out and stared. The paint wasn't just washed, it was cleaned, the way you clean something you care about. Wheel wells black again, handles wiped, the scratch on the rear door still there because scratches don't wash out. A slip of paper sat under the wiper, folded against the weather: labor, mount and balance, disposal, three lines in a ballpoint slant, and at the bottom, Warranty three months.
Julian was crouched by a motorcycle on the apron with a socket wrench in his fist. He finished the turn, stood, and wiped his palms down his jeans before he looked at me.
"Any better?"
