Chapter 15: Petersburg

My father's shop sits behind a chain-link fence on a corner of Petersburg, between a tire store and a church.

Eleanor parked the Volvo next to a pickup with no hood and looked at the sign over the bay doors.

DELGADO COLLISION, it said, in red paint my uncle had touched up every spring.

"Your mother is going to hate me," she said.

"My mother hates everyone for the first hour."

"That is not comforting."

"It's accurate."

My father came out wiping his hands on a rag, a broad man in grey coveralls, with a mustache gone white at the edges.

He looked at me, then at Eleanor, then at the Volvo.

I watched him do the math on a grown woman in pearls and a daughter in a hoodie.

"Papá, this is Eleanor," I said. "She's my friend."

"Your friend," he said, in Spanish, with an eyebrow.

"My very good friend."

"Mr. Delgado." Eleanor held out her hand, and he shook it, and she did not flinch at the grease.

"Sam says you can fix anything with two wrenches and a bad attitude."

He laughed in spite of himself.

Inside, he took a business card out of the cash drawer and laid it on the counter between us.

FITZHUGH LUMBER COMPANY. LOWELL FITZHUGH, CHIEF EXECUTIVE.

"He came at lunch," my father said.

"Big man, nice shoes. He said he had forty company trucks that need a body shop. A contract for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year."

"For what?"

"For nothing. He said it was a gift to a hardworking family." He turned the card over.

"On the back he wrote that his stepmother is a fragile woman and my daughter should let her heal in peace."

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