Chapter 5: The Loft

"I came to buy a car," I said through the glass.

"I figured."

"Not from you. From your brother."

"He's inside. He's going to be unbearable about it."

He was.

Roddy Ossler came out of the shop at a run, a welding cap on backward and black curls sticking out from under it.

"Hayley Rydell," he said. "On our mountain. In our yard. I want it on the record that I said she'd come and you said she'd sooner walk into the sea."

"I said the river," Torrey said.

"Same thing with fewer sharks."

"Six days," I said. "A late model. Race-ready by Saturday night. Can you do it?"

"Can I do it." Roddy put a hand on his chest. "Torrey, she wounds me."

"Can you?"

"Yes. But first you eat. Nobody does business on this mountain hungry."

The Greenhorn pack eats supper together in a long room off the shop, at one table made of an old garage door on sawhorses.

There were about twenty of them, changed back from the yard into jeans and flannels.

They looked at me.

Then a woman with flour on her arms put a bowl of chili in front of me and a stack of tortillas, and that was that.

It was loud. Everybody talked at once.

Roddy talked through all of it.

He told me about the spring car and the Ventura car.

He told me about a car he built out of a tractor when he was twelve, which, he said, still holds the record for the dirt road.

"The record for the dirt road is a tractor?" I said.

"It's a very good tractor."

I laughed before I could stop it.

Torrey looked at me across the table.

Then he looked away.

At the head of the table was one empty chair. It was a big oak chair with a cushion worn flat.

Nobody sat in it. Nobody put a plate in front of it.

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