Chapter 9 — Grease Under Her Nails
934 Words
Marlowe
The old man didn't even look up from the engine block when I asked if I could sweep his floor for free, which felt, honestly, like the most promising response I'd gotten from anyone in this den so far.
"Nobody sweeps a floor for free." Wrench had a voice like gravel dragged over more gravel, and hands so scarred they looked like a roadmap of every mistake he'd ever fixed. "Nobody sweeps a floor at all if they've got a lick of sense. It's a garage. It's supposed to be filthy."
"I'll sweep it anyway."
That got me a look — the first one, quick and sharp, up and down, the kind of assessment that had nothing to do with my face and everything to do with whether my hands looked like they'd ever actually held a tool. "Why."
Because my father used to smell like this — oil and metal and something underneath both that I'd spent twelve years without a name for. Because this was the one room in the whole den that felt like it might have belonged to him once, in some other version of this story where he got to grow old.
"Because I'm good at it," I said instead. "The mechanics. Not the sweeping."
Wrench grunted, which I was starting to learn was less a sound and more an entire vocabulary if you knew how to listen for the variations. This particular grunt meant *prove it.*
He nodded at the bike propped on the lift beside him — an old cruiser, carburetor flooding, coughing every time he tried to turn it over. "Fix that. Don't touch anything else. And if you break something that wasn't already broken, you're paying for it out of whatever a prospect actually gets paid, which is nothing, so think carefully."
I had it stripped down and diagnosed in four minutes flat, the float stuck from age and grime rather than any real damage, and I want to say I felt nervous doing it in front of him. Mostly I felt like I was breathing for the first time since I'd walked through that gate.
The engine turned over clean on the first try.
Wrench looked at the running bike. Looked at me. Looked back at the bike, like he was double-checking it hadn't been running the whole time and he'd simply missed it.
"Huh." One syllable, and somehow it carried more weight than an entire speech would have from anyone else in this den.
"Is that good or bad?"
"That's a *huh,* kid. Don't overthink a *huh.*" He wiped his hands on a rag that had clearly given up on being clean sometime during the last decade, and jerked his chin toward the far corner. "Bay's open back there. Nobody's using it. You want to actually learn something instead of just proving you already know it, you can start earning it properly instead of begging."
It took me a second to understand he'd just offered me an apprenticeship disguised as an insult, which, I was quickly learning, was exactly how everything worked in this club.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than I'd meant almost anything since I cut my hair off in a bathroom mirror four days and a whole different life ago.
"Don't thank me. Thank me when you haven't burned my garage down in a month." He was already turning back to his own work, done with the conversation the way a man is done with a task and not a person. "And close your mouth next time somebody catches you smiling like that. Makes you look soft."
I hadn't realized I was smiling until he said it.
---
I didn't notice King in the doorway until I turned around to grab a rag of my own, and by then he'd clearly been standing there long enough that pretending I hadn't seen him felt more awkward than acknowledging it.
He didn't say anything. Didn't ask what I was doing, didn't comment on the engine, didn't do any of the things I half-expected a President to do when he found a prospect somewhere she hadn't officially been assigned. He just stood there, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I couldn't read at all, for long enough that Wrench finally glanced up too.
"You need something, King, or you just here to make my new kid nervous?"
"Neither." He didn't move. Didn't stop watching me either. "Just looking."
"Well, quit it. Bad for productivity." Wrench didn't sound remotely bothered by talking to the club's President like he was an intern who'd wandered somewhere he shouldn't be, which told me more about the actual pecking order in this den than anything else had so far.
King's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile, there and gone before I could be sure of it. He pushed off the doorframe, unhurried, and left without another word — no order given, no explanation offered, nothing except the distinct, uncomfortable feeling of having been read cover to cover by someone who hadn't said a single sentence the whole time.
Wrench watched him go, then looked at me with an expression that had gone from gruff to something closer to calculating.
"He do that a lot? Just show up and stare?"
"First time." It wasn't, not really, but it was the first time it had happened somewhere that felt like it was starting to be mine.
"Huh," Wrench said again, and this time I understood exactly what kind of *huh* it was, and it had nothing to do with the carburetor at all.
- Writer
