It was my day off and I was passing the garage anyway.
That was what I told myself. Birchwood Lane to Millhaven Road was a deliberate detour, but the sun was decent for a Tuesday and I had two coffees from the place on the corner. There was no reason not to stop.
This was the kind of thing I did now. Stopped in, showed up with coffee. Let myself be a person who did that.
I was still getting used to it.
The garage door was open, the radio going, the familiar smell of oil and rubber hitting me before I was fully through the door. Bellows was at his bench with his back to me, doing something unhurried to a brake caliper. He didn't look up.
"He's out back," he said.
"Good morning to you too."
He set the caliper down and turned, assessing me with the expression he reserved for deciding if a thought was worth the oxygen to speak it. Then he looked at the two cups.
"That one for me?"
"It’s for Jack."
"Mm." He turned back to his bench. "He already had one."
I smiled. "Then he can have a second."
Something moved in his face that wasn't quite a smile but was adjacent to one. We'd gotten to this point over the last few months, Bellows and I. A kind of wordless mutual acknowledgment that we were both, in our different ways, invested in the same outcome. He didn't say much about it; he didn't need to. He just occasionally accepted coffee he didn't need and occasionally said things that weren't quite advice and let the rest speak for itself.
"How is he?" I said. I didn't know exactly why I asked it. Just that Bellows saw the version of Jack that didn't have to perform for a five-year-old or me.
Bellows looked at the caliper. "Working hard," he said. "Thinking harder."
"About what?"
He finally looked at me. "Go find out," he said.
I went through.
Jack was leaning against the brick wall of the yard, phone to his ear, his back half-turned. He hadn't heard me over the low hum of the garage compressor.
"—yeah, I understand," he was saying. His voice was low, that flat, hard tone he used when he was talking about a problem he didn't like. "Just tell me what we’re looking at, timeline-wise." A pause. "Right. And that’s—okay. Don’t say anything to anyone yet. I’ll be in touch."
He hung up and turned.
He saw me, and his expression didn’t so much open up as itreset.
"Hey," he said. "I didn't know you were coming."
"Spontaneous," I said. I held out the coffee, my eyes already tracing the rigid line of his shoulders.
He took the cup. That’s when I saw it—the left side of his jaw. It was a localized hematoma, a deep plum color just beginningto bleed into yellow at the edges. It wasn't dramatic yet, but by tomorrow, it would be impossible to hide.
"What happened to your face?"
He touched the spot, a brief, reflexive movement. "Caught a corner," he said. "In one of the bays. I wasn't paying attention."
I looked at the mark. A metal bay frame would have left a laceration or a linear abrasion. This was deep and rounded. A corner of a bay didn't leave a bruise shaped like a fist, or did it?
"You okay?" I asked.
"Fine," he said. "Just clumsy." He took a sip of the coffee, but his eyes were already drifting past me, back toward the garage. "Busy day. I should probably?—"