It smelled like machine oil and coffee. A small electric space heater ran in the corner. The radio played a classic rock station with more static than signal. She sat on a metal stool and watched him rewire a commercial control panel for a building whose facilities manager had called that morning in a low-grade panic. He worked with a methodical efficiency that was entirely unlike the way she worked.
She moved fast, made decisions quickly, corrected course in real time. He did not move slowly exactly, but he completed each step fully before beginning the next one. And he did not appear to experience the particular anxiety of things left unfinished. She asked him once how he'd gotten into electrical work. "My uncle ran a shop," he said without looking up from the panel.
"I spent summers helping him when I was 15, 16. I was decent at it. Decent felt like enough at the time. Was it? He considered the question with the same care he gave everything.
It turned out to be more than enough, he said. Most things do if you're willing to actually do them. She thought about that more than she wanted to. The afternoon she met Lily was not planned. Ethan's usual after school arrangement fell through at 2:30 on a Wednesday.
His neighbor, who picked Lily up on days he was running late, had a minor emergency of her own and called him 20 minutes before school let out. He was in the middle of a service call at a property three blocks from Lily's school. He told Natalie, who happened to be in the passenger seat of his truck on the way to look at a site nearby that he needed to make a stop. Natalie said that was fine. Lily was standing on the sidewalk in front of the school in a green jacket, a backpack half her height, and an expression of measured patience that looked in congruous on an 11-year-old.
She got in the back seat, and Natalie turned slightly to say hello, and Lily looked at her with clear, even eyes. "You're the rich woman my dad is seeing," Lily said. "Lily," Ethan said from the driver's seat, his voice flat with parental warning. I'm just checking, Lily said. I saw a picture.
It's accurate, Natalie said. And it's nice to meet you. Lily appeared to find this response acceptable. She buckled her seat belt, pulled out a library book, and read in silence for 4 minutes before she looked up again. "Are you going to try to buy him things?" she asked.
"I'm not planning to," Natalie said. "Good," Lily said. "He doesn't like that. He gave back a check once and didn't even tell me until like 3 weeks later. That sounds like him, Natalie said.