Full Throttle

I'm Frankie, I'm forty-four years old, and I've been called sensible so many times it's basically my name now. Frankie the Sensible. That's what my crew calls me anyway. Kimmy, who's been my partner at the shop for six years, says I color inside the lines even when nobody's holding the crayon. Thanks a lot, Kimmy.

Here's the thing. Wait. I'm not supposed to say that. Here's what I mean, then.

For six years I've been dating the way you file your taxes. Carefully, once a year, with no surprises. A string of perfectly nice dinners with perfectly nice women who wanted perfectly normal things. Nobody wrong. Nobody exciting either. My last serious anything ended when I was thirty-eight, and since then I've been coasting. You know that feeling? Like your life is a car idling in a parking lot with the engine warm and nowhere to go?

So Friday morning I woke up and decided, before coffee even, that today I was gonna be reckless. Just once. One day of saying yes to whatever came at me.

Okay, not whatever. I'm still me. I wasn't gonna jaywalk into traffic or eat gas station sushi. But reckless in the ways that scare me, which are mostly the social ones. Talk to strangers. Flirt without a backup plan. Take the swing instead of the walk.

And what was on the calendar that day? The Classic Rev car show, out at the big show garage on the edge of town. My oldest friend Tara was entering a vintage racer she'd spent three years restoring, and she'd been nagging me to come for weeks. Sensible Frankie had said maybe. Reckless Frankie put on her good boots and drove out there with the windows down.

The place smelled like grease and hot pavement and somebody's awful cigar. Rows of polished classics everywhere, hoods up, crowds everywhere. I love a car show, don't get me wrong. But I'd been to a hundred. The plan was to say hi to Tara, look at her racer, eat something fried, and leave. Sensible plan.

I found her near the temporary pit area, arguing cheerfully with a guy about tire pressure. Tara's forty-two, we've known each other since forever, and she's the kind of person who organizes a car show and then yells at the car show she organized. She saw me and waved me over with both arms.

"Frankie! You came! Look at her, look at my girl!" She patted the fender of this deep green racer like it was a horse. "Isn't she perfect?"

"She's gorgeous, Tara. You did good."

"WE did good. Your wiring harness carried half this build and you know it." She grabbed my arm. "There's someone I want you to meet. Stay right there, don't you dare wander off."

So I stayed, looking at the racer, and that's when I saw her. Under the car, actually. Just legs and a flashlight sticking out from under the chassis, and a voice saying, "Tara, hand me the nine-sixteenth, and don't hand me the three-eighths again, I will know."

"Language, we're at church," Tara said, grinning at me. "Celia, get out here, I've got someone for you."

The legs slid out. Then the rest of her. Young, maybe late twenties, dark hair pulled back, coveralls unzipped to the waist over a tank top, a smear of grease across one cheekbone. She stood up, wiped her hands on a rag, and looked right at me. Not past me. At me. Do you know how rare that is? Most people's eyes slide off a forty-four-year-old woman at a car show like I'm a vending machine.

"Frankie, this is Celia. She's my engineer on this build. Celia, Frankie's the one who did the harness."

"The harness?" Celia's whole face changed. "Oh my god, you did the Period Correct thing with the cloth-wrapped looms? That section is the cleanest work under this entire car. I've been showing it off to people like it's mine. I should stop doing that." She stuck out her hand. "Hi. Sorry. Hi."

We shook hands and I felt something in my chest go, huh, interesting. Her hand was warm and greasy and she didn't do the limp handshake thing.

"You're an engineer on this?" I asked. "You look about nineteen."

"I'm twenty-nine, thanks very much," she said, laughing. "I get that all day. The crew at the track calls me The Baby. I have a degree and everything. It's in a drawer somewhere."

"The track?" I asked.

"She races," Tara said, in the tone of a proud mom.

"I don't race, I wrench and I run data," Celia said, waving the rag. "Racing is for people who sleep well. I want to race. I'm not supposed to say that out loud at a show, everyone gets weird." She squatted back down and looked under the car, then up at me. "You're an electrician, right? Tara said shop electrician? Like, actual licensed?"

"Twenty years licensed. Auto and industrial."

"Oh, thank god." She stood up again and pointed into the engine bay. "Okay, so this ignition coil is being a jerk. It fires cold, then it stumbles when it heats up, and I've replaced everything with a brain and I'm starting to think it's the wiring at the ballast resistor, which is YOUR section, ma'am, so no pressure."

"There's pressure," Tara said sweetly.

"Celia." A guy in a vendor shirt was waving from three rows over. "We need you at the dyno display, they're killing me."

"Coming," she yelled, then looked at me. "Frankie, can you just... look at it? Don't fix anything, just look and tell me what you think? I'll be back in twenty minutes and I've been losing my mind over this for two days."

"Go," I said. "I'll look."

She ran off, then turned around halfway and called back, "It was really nice to meet you. I'm serious about the harness."

And I stood there like an idiot with my hand still sort of half-raised.

Tara was watching me with a face I know too well. "So," she said.

"So what?"

"So nothing. You're making a face."

"I'm not making a face." I absolutely was making a face. "Your car's got an ignition problem, that's all that's happening here."

"Uh huh." Tara leaned on the fender. "Celia's great. She's one of my favorite people. She used to... you know what, I'm not gonna do this. She's a grown woman, you're a grown woman. Whatever. Look at her coil."

"Tara. What are you doing?"

"Being an organizer. I'm busy. Bye." And she literally walked away, whistling.

Okay. So. Full disclosure, because you're my reader and you deserve it. I knew about Celia before I met her. Tara mentioned her a few times over the years. Celia dated Tara for a few months, what was it, two years ago now, and they split fine, stayed friends, all very adult. Tara never said much beyond "she's sharp" and "she's a lot." Both true, as it turns out.

So there I was, alone with a classic racer and a problem coil, and I did the thing I actually do well. I opened the section, checked the ballast resistor wiring, and found it in about four minutes. A chafed spot where the loom had rubbed against a bracket, intermittent contact, heat expands the metal, boom, there's your stumble. Textbook. I took a photo and did not fix it, because she asked me not to, and I figured if I fixed her problem in five minutes she'd have no reason to come back.

Was that a strategy? Was I strategizing? Me?

I sat on a tire stack and waited, feeling like a nervous rookie, which is embarrassing to type. A vendor sold me a lemonade. I drank it too fast. A guy asked me if I was with the green car and I said "sorta" and he nodded like that meant something.

Twenty-five minutes later Celia came jogging back, coveralls now tied around her waist, and I have to tell you the truth, which is that my pulse picked up the second I saw her coming. Is that reckless? No. That's just a pulse. The reckless part was what I did next.

"Okay, tell me everything," she said, slightly out of breath. "Was it the resistor? Please say it was the resistor so I can stop hating myself."

"It wasn't the resistor. Your resistor's fine. The loom's chafed against the bracket back here, see?" I showed her the photo on my camera. "One zip tie and some sleeve and she's cured."

"You're kidding." She looked at the photo, then at the car, then at me. "Four minutes? It took you four minutes?"

"Twenty years."

"Ugh. Okay. I owe you a drink. Or dinner. Or my firstborn, whichever." She said it fast and easy, joking, and then she went quiet for a second and looked at me again, that same direct look. "Or, actually. Dinner. Are you doing anything after this? Because I don't want to do the thing where I think about asking for two days and then it's weird."

My sensible self had a whole speech loaded. Something about how she was Tara's friend, something about how I was tired and had an early shift, something smooth and polite and dead.

"Actually I'm free," I heard myself say. "Dinner sounds great."

"Cool." She exhaled like she'd been holding it. "Cool. Okay. There's a taco place like ten minutes from here that's open late, it's nothing fancy, but it's kind of my church."

"Tacos it is. You're buying, remember, you owe me."

"Four minutes of work. I'm buying tacos AND a beer, don't push it." She grinned and started reassembling her toolkit, then paused. "Frankie? Thanks. Really."

"No problem, rookie."

"Do NOT call me rookie."

"Yes ma'am."

She laughed and went back to the dyno display, and I sat there on my tire stack with my empty lemonade cup, thinking, well. That's one yes down. Reckless day, so far so good. What I didn't know yet was how many yeses were coming, or how fast.

The show ran till dark. Celia found me twice more, once to show me the dyno numbers and once for no reason at all that either of us could name. Tara watched the second one happen and gave me a thumbs up from thirty feet away like a lunatic.

By the time the announcer said the show was closing, I'd already said yes to dinner. I just didn't know what came after dinner yet.

Nobody did.

We closed the place down, me and Celia and a couple hundred strangers and the smell of burnt rubber and funnel cake. I helped her tarp the green car, because I'm not a monster and also because I wasn't ready to stop standing next to her. That's it. That's the honest reason. The sensible reason was "she could use a hand." Sure, Frankie.

"Watch the corner, it'll snag," she said, pulling the tarp over the hood. We stretched it across the racer together and her hand ended up next to mine on the edge, and I let go a half second later than I needed to. She noticed. She absolutely noticed.

"So here's the thing," she said, tucking a corner under the rear bumper. "I've got one more thing to do before I lock up the pit area. Take two minutes. Come with or don't, your choice."

"Bossy."

"Organizing. It's a skill."

So I followed her. Pit area had a back section I hadn't seen, behind the main floor, where they kept the project cars that weren't ready for eyes. There was a big sedan shape under a grey tarp, dust all over it, one bare wheel sticking out like a hoof. Celia killed most of the lights back there but left one work lamp burning on a stand, yellow and soft, and the whole corner went quiet the second we passed under it. Show noise got muffled. Just the two of us and a car that nobody loved yet.

"This is mine," she said, patting the tarp. "Well, mine and a loan. Picked it up dirt cheap because somebody cooked the wiring harness, and you know how much I love wiring."

"Almost as much as you love blaming the resistor."

"I will never stop blaming the resistor." She peeled the tarp back off the front end. "Come look. I want a professional opinion, and you're the only licensed electrician within a mile who's talked to me today."

I leaned in under the cowl with the lamp. Old harness, chopped up, splices wrapped in the wrong tape. Somebody's nephew had been in there, clearly. She leaned in beside me, shoulder against my shoulder, and pointed at a junction block.

"See that? That's where it goes to die."

"That's where everything goes to die, that splice is a crime scene." I reached past her to trace the wire, and her hand was there at the same time, both of us on the same loom, her fingers over mine. And neither of us moved. A second. Two seconds. Long enough that I could feel her pulse, or mine, hard to say whose, and the show noise got real far away.

"Sorry," she said, not moving.

"I'm not."

"Okay." She still didn't move. "Good answer."

Eventually, and it took actual willpower, we both pulled back and stood there in the lamplight grinning like idiots. She shoved her hands in her coverall pockets and rocked on her heels.

"You're not what I expected, you know," she said.

"What'd you expect?"

"I don't know. Somebody named Frankie the Sensible who'd tell me all evening about her 401k."

"Oh, I've got a 401k. It's a great 401k. I'll do a whole presentation."

"Frankie."

"Celia."

She laughed, that loud laugh again, and then she went kind of still and looked at me the way she'd looked at me at the tire stack. Direct. No squint.

"Tacos," she said. "Before I do something dumb, tacos. Car's not going anywhere."

"Smart. Sensible, even."

"Don't ruin it."

We walked out through the emptying show floor, past vendors folding tables, past the trophy case, and I clocked Tara at the door doing organizer things and she clocked us and I swear to you she wiggled her eyebrows. Forty-two years old. Wiggled her eyebrows. I gave her a look that could strip paint and she just grinned and went back to her clipboard.