Greaser and the Blueprint

I had a plan on Saturday. A good one, too. Surprise Yuri at work, bring him lunch, look cute doing it. Simple.

So why was I sitting in my Corolla on the industrial strip off Cicero, checking my stomach in the rearview mirror for the fourth time?

I'm 35, Black, Chicago born and raised, and my body has started keeping receipts. My stomach is soft now. There's a shelf of it that no amount of Pilates has ever negotiated down. And I hated that I was sitting there doing the mirror thing, because I'm an architect, I run meetings, I tell grown adults where the load goes. But there I was, sucking in, letting it out, sucking in again.

Here's the funny part. I lied on my dating profile too.

Not a big lie! A little one. When it asked about fitness I put "active" and picked a photo from two years earlier where I looked lean. Then Yuri and I met when I was 34, and by the third date I was terrified he'd figure out that "active" meant "walks to the mailbox." I never corrected the record. I just kept wearing dark colors and standing at angles.

And him? His profile said he worked with cars. Vague, right? I read that as engineer. Design, specs, CAD, a guy with a desk and a nameplate. I built a whole Yuri in my head. An engineer boyfriend fit so neatly next to an architect girlfriend. Matching lanyards!

We'd been dating a year now and he never once mentioned his actual job title. He also never talked much at all about work, which I had decided meant he was modest. God, I was confident about that.

So. Lunch bag on the passenger seat. Two tuna sandwiches. Cute sundress that I had already decided fought my stomach and lost. I got out of the car.

* * *

Russo's Auto & Fabrication was a two-bay garage squatting between a scrap yard and a place that sold only chain-link fence. The sign was hand painted and the R had rusted into an O at some point, so it said RUSSO'S AUTO & FABRICATION with the confidence of a typo. Grease had made its own artwork on the concrete apron out front. A car up on the lift in bay one had its whole rear end hollowed out like a pumpkin.

Where was an engineer's polo in all this?

I walked in under the rolling door, heels already clicking wrong on the floor, and there he was. My Yuri. In a coverall with the top half unzipped and tied off at his waist over a gray t shirt that had a black thumbprint on the chest. His forearms were filthy. His hair was pushed back with what I strongly suspect was a swipe of his own wrist.

He and another guy, big, bearded, in a Russo's shirt, were hunched under a transmission hanging from a chain hoist.

"On three, Yuri! Three!"

"It never works when you count," Yuri said. "Just lift."

They lifted. The thing swung up and settled onto the jack stand with a clang that rattled my teeth. Yuri steadied it with both hands, guided it onto the studs, and started threading bolts by feel, fast, like the bolts were old friends.

I stood there with my lunch bag and my sundress and my whole imaginary Yuri collapsing in my chest like a bad foundation.

A mechanic. He was a mechanic. A grease monkey, as my father would say with that tone. And my face was already doing something I couldn't stop, some pinched thing, because I'd spent a year quietly ranking him in my head against a man who didn't exist.

He saw me.

"Kiara!" His whole face lit up. He grabbed a rag off his shoulder and wiped his hands, which did about forty percent of the job, and crossed the floor in five long steps. "What are you doing here? How did you even find this place?"

"You never gave me an address, so I looked up the shop you mentioned once. Russo's." I held up the bag like evidence.

He kissed me, quick, tasting like coffee and metal, and didn't seem to notice my stiffness. Or he noticed and filed it. Yuri files a lot.

"You brought me lunch." He beamed at the bag. "Come in, come in, it's freezing out there. Well, it's freezing in here too, but it's a friendly freezing."

The office was a glass box in the corner with a desk, a space heater, and a coffee maker that had clearly been through some things. He poured from the pot into a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST FISHERMAN and handed it over.

"It's the good pot," he said. "The other one is Doug's and Doug's coffee is a war crime."

"Yuri." I wrapped both hands around the mug. "You fix cars?"

It came out wrong the second it left my mouth. I heard it. It came out with a little dip at the end, a disappointed note, the kind of tone I'd use about a cracked slab. His smile, which had been so wide, pulled in a bit at the corners.

"Yeah," he said. "That's the job. Why, what did you think?"

What did I think. I thought engineer. I thought button down. I thought I'd walk in and find him at a workstation with three monitors and a lanyard, and that some quiet worry I've been carrying would settle.

"I thought..." I looked into the mug. "I don't know what I thought. Your profile said you work with cars."

"I never said engineer, Kiara." He wasn't angry. That was worse somehow. He said it gently, like he was handing me a fact and letting me decide what it weighed. "I've been turning wrenches since I came over from Japan at twenty-two. It's a good job. I'm good at it."

"I know that. I know it's a good job."

"Do you?" He asked it without heat. He set down his own mug and picked up the rag again, wiping at hands that were already as clean as they were getting. "Because you made a face when you walked in. I saw it. It's okay, but I saw it."

"It's not about the job."

"Then what is it about?"

And that is the question, isn't it. Because it wasn't about the job, not really. It was about me, and my little profile lie, and my stomach in the rearview mirror, and a year of me measuring him against a blueprint I never showed him. But I couldn't say all that standing in a greasy office holding WORLD'S OKAYEST FISHERMAN.

"Nothing," I said.

Yuri looked at me. He's not a talker, my Yuri, but he misses nothing, and I could see him deciding not to push it. Not yet.

"Okay," he said finally. "Well. Sit with me at lunch. Doug will cry if I share your sandwiches, so let him cry."

I sat down on the cracked vinyl chair and drank the terrible good coffee, and somewhere behind the glass, the bearded guy in the Russo's shirt wolf whistled at Yuri, who flipped him off without even turning around.

"Is that Doug?" I asked.

"That's Doug."

We ate the tuna sandwiches at his little desk, knees bumping under it, and it was almost normal. Almost. But I kept catching myself doing the math on his hands, on the coveralls, on the whole picture of him, and every time I did my jaw did that pinched thing again.

"Okay, stop," he said finally, folding his sandwich wrapper into a neat square. "You're doing the face again. The fourth one since we sat down. I counted."

"I don't have a face."

"You have many faces. This one is new." He leaned back in the chair, which groaned in protest. "You want to tell me upstairs? I have tea. And a chair that doesn't bite."

I should have gone back to my office. I had a client call at two. I had drawings to fix. But instead I said "yes" before my brain finished the sentence, and that's how I ended up following him up a narrow metal staircase behind the garage, my hand on a railing that was colder than the day deserved.

His apartment above the shop was small and surprised me. Grease smell downstairs, sure, but up here it was jasmine tea and a shelf of actual books and a window with a tomato plant on the sill. In January. A tomato plant, indoors, in a pot with a little stake. He put the kettle on without asking, like he already knew I'd say yes to tea, and I sat on the arm of his couch and looked at my hands.

"Kiara." He crouched in front of the low cabinet instead of standing over me, which felt like a thing he did on purpose. "The face. Tell me."

And because I'm apparently incapable of grace, it all came out sideways.

"Fine! You want to know? I thought you were an engineer. Okay? I built a whole person in my head. A person with a lanyard! And I've spent a year not asking