Last Embers

You don't expect to end up running a junkyard. Let me back up.

My name is Katya, I'm twenty-nine, and I manage a salvage yard on the edge of a small French town that most maps skip. Crushed cars in rows, rusted machinery, a fence that leans in the places nobody bothers to fix. It smells like oil and rain, and I love it, which surprises people more than anything else about me.

The man who taught me everything about this place was named Alphonse Dubois. He ran the yard for forty years. I met him five years ago when I came out here looking for a part for a car I couldn't even afford to fix, and he hired me on the spot because, he said, I asked good questions and didn't flinch at the dog. Two years ago he handed me the manager's keys. Last month he died in his sleep at seventy-eight, which is honestly the best ending a junkyard man can hope for.

And here is the strange part. His will, this actual legal document drawn up by an actual notary, states that his ashes are to be scattered here. At the yard. Specifically in the back field where the hawks nest, which he called "the only civilized corner of this entire pile of rust."

So that's how I ended up walking the back rows on a Tuesday morning with a wooden box under my arm, feeling like the world's most unlikely funeral director.

"Okay, old man," I said to the box. "You picked a hell of a spot."

The box didn't answer, which was very unlike him.

I had asked his daughter to come, but she lives far away and the trip was hard for her, so she gave me the box at the notary's office and cried in the parking lot and told me Alphonse would have laughed at the whole arrangement. I believed her. He laughed at everything, including my first attempt at driving the forklift, which nearly took out the office wall.

The back field is where the yard gives up on being a yard. The rows of cars stop, the weeds take over, and there's a strip of scrubby ground with an old oak on it. For years, a pair of birds has nested somewhere back there. Alphonse protected them like they were his own grandchildren. He'd fine anybody who disturbed that corner, and I mean fine, he kept a ledger.

I was standing there working out where exactly you scatter a man who loved one specific patch of dirt when I heard the gate.

Now. Our gate is loud. It's the loudest gate in the department, I'd bet money on it. Somebody had opened it and somebody had come in, and I did what any sensible woman alone with her mentor's ashes does. I put the box down on a stump and walked around the corner of the crushed sedan row to see who was trespassing.

It was a man with a falcon on his fist.

I want you to picture that for a second. Our yard. The rust. The leaning fence. And a tall guy in work boots with a hooded peregrine sitting calm as Sunday on his glove, like this happens every day, which I can promise you it does not.

"Can I help you?" I called out.

He turned, and I stopped walking.

The thing about faces you knew six years ago is this. You don't recognize them right away. You recognize them halfway, in pieces, and then all at once. I had spent half a year telling myself the falconer I watched through the fence was just a coincidence of posture. Up close, the coincidence ended. The jaw, the way he stood, that little scar over his eyebrow from a night I personally witnessed the origin of.

"Bo?" I said.

"Katya?" He said it like a question, like there could possibly be another woman in a French salvage yard holding a raptor and staring at him. "Katya, oh my god. You work here?"

"I run here." I heard my own voice crack on the word run, which was mortifying. "Wait, why are you here? Why are you here with a bird?"

"I could ask why you're here in work boots, but honestly it suits you." Then he caught himself and got serious. "Alphonse Dubois. His ashes. I heard about it through Jeff, my mentor. Jeff knew him for years, they used to trade stories about the birds back here. I walked over to pay my respects. I didn't know you'd be the one, I mean, of all the people in the world."

"Of all the junkyards in the world," I said, and we both laughed, and the laugh did something to the air between us that I didn't have a plan for.

The falcon shifted on his glove. Up close it was gorgeous, slate back, that pale chest, eyes like nothing else on earth.

"This is Aster," he said. "She's six. Peregrine. Rehab bird, couldn't be released, so she flies with me. I work at the raptor center just down the road, the one behind your fence line."

"The one Alphonse used to take sandwiches to?"

"The very one. He kept half the staff fed for a decade. Jeff's been mourning him all week. That's actually why I came today instead of the memorial. Jeff wanted to fly Aster over the field, said it was the sendoff the old man would have wanted. Is that, is now bad? Are you in the middle of something?"

I looked at the box on the stump and felt my throat go tight.

"That's him, isn't it," Bo said quietly. He adjusted the bird on his glove and stepped closer. "Katya, I'm so sorry. I knew him too, a little. He found an injured kestrel for me once this spring, drove it to the center himself in the back of his pickup with the radio playing."

"That sounds exactly like him." I wiped my face with my sleeve, no ceremony about it. "Sorry. I've been holding it together all week and apparently a falcon was the thing that broke me."

"Falcons break a lot of people," he said. "It's basically our whole business model."

So we walked the yard. That's what you do here, you walk, because the yard is long and the talk is easier when your hands are busy. He told me he'd been at the raptor center since March, that he'd apprenticed under Jeff for eight years at the Lyon site before Jeff moved him down here, that Aster had a wing injury from a power line and a temperament best described as "opinionated." I told him about the yard, about Alphonse hiring me, about the keys.

"You run this whole place at twenty-nine?" he said.

"I run this whole place at twenty-nine," I confirmed. "My mother still tells people I work at a car dump. I've stopped correcting her."

"Who was it who said we'd both end up doing something real?"

"You did! You said, and I quote, we can't sit around theorizing forever, Katya, somebody has to actually touch dirt." I pointed at his boots. "Look at you. Touching dirt."

He grinned, and I felt that old pull in my chest, six years old and still working. Which was ridiculous. Which was a problem for later Katya.

We passed the row of dead Peugeots and I asked the question I'd been sitting on since the gate.

"Do you ever think about that semester?" I asked. "We never really talked about why it ended."

Bo stopped walking. Aster roused her feathers, all puffed up and then smooth again.

"Every week," he said. "For about the first two years. Less after that, but it never went away. You left without an explanation and I let you, because I was twenty-three and stupid."

"I was twenty-three and stupid too," I said. "I had a job offer in another city and I panicked and I told myself a clean break was kinder. It wasn't. It was just faster."

We looked at each other across a stack of tires, of all things.

"I thought about you too," I admitted. "More than I want to confess with a straight face."

"Confess anyway," he said. "I've got all afternoon, and apparently so do you."

Behind us, on the stump, a wooden box waited in the sun, and I had a sudden feeling the old man had arranged this whole thing from beyond the grave just to mess with me. He would have. He absolutely would have.

We ended up back at the office shed because Bo needed water and Aster needed shade, and that's how Clara found us, standing in my doorway with two sandwiches and a face full of questions.

"This is Bo," I said. "From college. And that's Aster, from the sky, apparently."

"Hi, Bo from college," Clara said, handing him a sandwich like she'd packed it for exactly this situation. "Katya has mentioned you exactly zero times in five years, which I now realize was suspicious."

"She has not," I said.

"She has not," Bo agreed, way too pleased about it.

We sat on crates out front and ate. Clara went back to the scale after ten minutes, because we had a buyer coming at two, but the whole time she was walking away she was grinning at me over her shoulder like an idiot. I ignored her. Mostly.

Bo set his sandwich crust on the crate edge and Aster took it with shocking delicacy for a bird that could clock two hundred kilometers an hour. He reached into his jacket pocket while she swallowed.

"Okay, so, the actual reason I came over here, besides Jeff's plan," he said. "Jeff's been sorting through Alphonse's things at the center. Stuff he left over the years. And he found something he thought I should bring to you before the scattering."

He pulled out a book. A spiral-bound thing with a faded cover, the kind of cheap notebook that costs two euros and outlives everyone.

"What is it?"

"A church cookbook," he said. "Some parish two towns over, probably from the seventies. Quiche Lorraine, confit by canard, the works. Except Alphonse never wrote in the recipes."

He opened it and turned it toward me. The pages were soft and swollen with age, and packed in the margins, in the blank backs, between the recipes, was handwriting. Small, patient handwriting. Dates. Descriptions.

"Oh," I said.

"Every bird he ever saw back here," Bo said. "Thirty years of it. Look, this entry, March, a kestrel pair in the oak. Here, he counted four buzzard chicks one spring and wrote 'bon air this year.' He tracked the peregrines back here before there even was a center. Katya, this book might be part of why the center exists. He was keeping records nobody asked him to keep."

I took it carefully, like it might crumble. The handwriting slanted hard to the right, and there were grease spots on half the pages, which somehow made it worse. He'd been eating his sandwiches and writing down hawks. For thirty years.

"He never showed me this," I said. "Five years. He told me about the birds, sure, he fined a guy two hundred euros for running a quad through the back field, but he never said he was keeping a whole diary."

"People like that don't show," Bo said. "They just do. That's why Jeff flew half the country's raptor people past his fence for years. Half of us learned things from this book and never knew where they came from."

I sat there holding a cookbook full of birds and thought about the number of times I'd told Alphonse his back field was bad for inventory flow. He'd just smile and change the subject. Bon air this year. God.

"There's a page near the end," Bo said, quieter. "Jeff flagged it. It's about a falconer who started coming around this spring. I don't know if you want to read it today."

"Give it."

He turned to the back. The entry was short. It said, in that patient slanting hand, that the young man from the center had good hands and bad patience, that the birds liked him anyway, and that the girl from the yard had clearly known him before, because she watched the flight pen through the fence for a full hour and never once looked at the birds.

I closed the book. My eyes were doing the thing again.

"He saw that?" I said. "When was that, he wrote that this spring, I didn't even, when did I do that?"

"Jeff says you did it a lot more than once," Bo said. "Apparently there's a whole bench by the fence with your wear pattern on it."

"I sit there on lunch breaks!"

"Sure," he said. "For the birds."

I threw a crust at him and he caught it out of the air and fed it to Aster, which honestly felt like cheating.

That was around when the volunteer showed up.

Her name was Margot, I learned later, twenty-something maybe, twenty-six, and she came through the gate in a center polo shirt with a clipboard and a smile aimed directly at Bo. She was pretty in a way that required no effort, which I hated on principle.

"Bo! I thought you were flying this morning," she said. Then she saw me and did the thing where you recalibrate in half a second. "Hi. Are you with the center?"

"She's with the yard," Bo said. "She runs it. Margot does flight conditioning with the rehab birds."

"Alphonse's yard?" Margot said, and her whole face went soft. "Oh, we all loved him. Are you doing the scattering? Jeff mentioned it." She touched Bo's arm while she said it, a light touch, familiar, the touch of someone who had touched before. "You should come by the center after. We're doing a little thing for