Last Lap

I was thirty-four years old and it had been five years since anyone had stayed for breakfast. Well, that's not fair. Five years since anyone had touched me and stayed for breakfast, anyway. I counted it once on a slow Thursday and then felt so pathetic I went and alphabetized the incident report folder just to punish myself.

The trouble with working part-time as a driving examiner is that you spend all day watching people fail at simple things. Parallel parking. Mirror checks. Not mounting the curb. After a while it gets into your head that everything worth having is just a matter of not mounting the curb, and I had mounted so many curbs by then I'd lost count.

My actual job was law. Contracts, mostly, three days a week in the city. I did the test center two days a week because it was quiet and orderly and nobody cried in my office. Well. Almost nobody.

"Hardy! You hear that? Third gear's singing again!"

That voice. That voice came through the wall like it came through walls in every building in the country. Theresa Fischer, mechanic, thirty-one years old, and the loudest human being I have ever shared a workplace with. I stood in the doorway of the garage bay and watched her slide out from under a Corolla on the creeper, laughing at something only she had heard.

"Third gear doesn't sing, Theresa. Cars don't sing."

"This one does. It's got a whole little tune going. Listen." She started the thing and there was a grinding noise like a garbage truck eating a piano.

"That's a bearing."

"That's art," she said, and laughed again, this big open-mouthed honk of a laugh that bounced off the corrugated walls. Susan, who was thirty-three and happily single and my main source of gossip, looked up from her clipboard and gave me the eyebrow. The eyebrow meant *she's doing it again*.

Theresa had been at the center two years. City hired her through some arrangement I never fully understood, something to do with her also running the traffic systems network, which frankly frightened me. A woman who could fix a gearbox and also reroute every light between here and the harbor was not a woman you wanted as an enemy. So I mostly just endured her. Loudly. She was a cyclist too, which should have made us friends, and for one stupid summer back when I was twenty-nine I'd dated a fellow rider and it had ended sweetly and I kept thinking that history might repeat with someone. It did not repeat with Theresa. Theresa was a forehead vein.

Except.

Except lately there was this thing happening that I did not have a name for, where she'd say something obnoxious and I'd feel this jolt, like a test candidate braking too hard, and I couldn't tell if it was irritation or something my body had decided to interpret strangely. It was very inconvenient. I filed it under irritation and moved on, the way I did with everything.

"You've got the Henderson kid at eleven?" Susan asked, checking her clipboard.

"Eleven fifteen. Reverse parallel and a hill start. He's failed twice."

"Poor little mite."

"He's twenty-two, Susan."

"Poor big mite, then."

At eleven fifteen I walked young Henderson out to the test car, ran through the preliminaries, and settled into the passenger seat with my tablet. I have looked through that window about two hundred times in my career without anything happening. On this particular Tuesday, Theresa was in the bay with her sleeves rolled up, leaning into the engine of that same Corolla, and I looked, and she looked up, and our eyes met through the glass.

And the jolt happened. Right on schedule. Except this time it didn't feel like irritation at all, and I hated that, and I said, "Please proceed to the roundabout, Mr. Henderson," in a voice about half an octave too high.

He passed, actually. First time in three tries. He was so happy he nearly climbed out of the car window to hug me, which would have been an instant fail, so I said, "Hands on the wheel, please," and he laughed and finished clean.

When I brought the car back, Theresa was wiping her hands on a rag outside the bay, watching me park.

"He passed," she said. It wasn't a question. She'd been watching the whole thing, I realized. She watched all my tests from the garage. I'd never noticed before how much she watched.

"He passed."

"You're a good teacher, Hardy."

"I'm not a teacher. I sit there and write things down."

"You sit there and you don't panic them. That's teaching." She tossed the rag over her shoulder, which should have looked sloppy and looked sort of not sloppy at all. "Anyway. You're on the training weekend, right? And I'm on it. So we're both stuck in a motel in Palmerston overnight, so I hope you packed patience."

The bottom dropped out of my week. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Training weekend. Mandatory. Muriel booked the rooms. Didn't Susan tell you?"

"Susan told me there was a training weekend. Susan did not tell me you were on it."

"Well I'm on it. Something about the new assessment software, and they want one mechanic and one examiner from each center, and guess who the one mechanic is." She spread her arms like she was presenting a prize hog. "Me."

"So it's you and me. In a motel. For a night."

"One night, one bathroom, and me snoring, probably. You can file a noise complaint." She grinned at me, and the jolt happened again, and this time I felt my face do something about it, some traitorous little twitch near my mouth, and she saw it. I know she saw it, because her grin changed. It got quieter. Not smug. Quieter.

"Right," I said. "Well. I'll bring earplugs."

"Bring the good ones. The foam ones are useless against me. Ask anyone."

I walked back to the office on legs that felt borrowed. Muriel was at her desk, fifty-two and unbothered, the way she had been unbothered through two floods and a hayfever season that nearly closed us down.

"Muriel. The motel rooms."

"What about them?"

"Theresa says we're sharing."

Muriel looked up over her glasses with the patience of a woman who has heard everything twice. "There was a mix-up with the booking. The center only got the one room in the name of the center, and I'm not paying for a second out of petty cash over a software weekend. It's one night, Lana. You're both adults."

"I'm thirty-four, Muriel. I have shared rooms before. I shared a flat for six years."

"And I'm sure you survived it. If it's truly unbearable, you can pay for your own room and claim it back, but honestly, I'd rather you didn't make a fuss over Fischer. She's good at her job."

"She's loud at her job."

"She's thorough at her job, which is better. Anything else?"

There wasn't anything else. There was never anything else with Muriel. I went back to my desk and sat with my chin in my hand and did the arithmetic I'd been avoiding. One night. One room. Theresa Fischer, who laughed as if a fire alarm were sounding and watched me through windows and had forearms I had absolutely never noticed before and was now unable to stop noticing, retroactively, across two full years of forearms.

Susan appeared at my shoulder with two teas, which is how she prefaced gossip.

"You look like you swallowed the roster," she said, sliding the mug over.

"I'm sharing a room with Fischer."

"Oh, that'll be fun!"

"It will not be fun. She's insufferable."

"Mm." Susan stirred her tea and looked at me over the rim with three years of happy singleness and zero stakes. "You know, the way you say her name has changed lately."

"It has not."

"It really has. You used to say it like a diagnosis. Now you say it like you're tasting something."

"I'm going back to my contracts."

"That's fine, run away, it's a free country." She sipped, watching me over the rim. "She fixed my car in February, you know. Wouldn't take any money. Said I seemed like the only sane one in the building."

"That proves she has terrible judgment."

"It proves she's nice under the noise. Anyway. One night, huh. Good luck with all that."

That night I sat in my flat and listened to my neighbor's television through the wall and thought about the locked piano in my mother's house, the one I inherited last year and have never once opened, because opening it means dealing with everything under the lid. Some things you keep shut and pay for the silence. Some things, apparently, you get booked into a motel with whether you like it or not.

I packed Thursday. Earplugs, the good foam ones. Two changes of clothes. A book I wouldn't read.

"Ready for the big adventure?" Theresa asked Friday morning, throwing her duffel into the back of her ute like luggage had personally wronged her.

"As ready as one gets."

"Try to look excited, Hardy. It's a whole day and a night of me. Some people would pay."

"Some people," I said, climbing in, "have very poor judgment."

"That's what I keep telling them," she said, and pulled out, and I caught myself smiling at the windscreen like I was an absolute fool, and stopped, and then didn't quite stop.

The drive to Palmerston took two and a half hours, and Theresa drove the way she did everything, which was with the radio loud and one hand on the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat with my book on my knees and read the same paragraph four times.

"So what do you actually do in the city?" she asked over the music. "Three days a week, right? Susan says you're a lawyer."

"Susan says a lot of things."

"Contracts mostly," I admitted. "It's dull. It pays well and it's dull. The test center is my two days of feeling like a person."

"Huh." She changed lanes without signaling, which made me grip my knees, and she noticed, because she noticed everything. "You know you've been gripping that door handle since we left the outskirts. I've had my license since I was twenty-one. I fix cars for a living, Hardy."

"I test drivers for a living. You fix cars."

"And run the traffic network, don't forget that part. Half the lights in this city obey me." She grinned at the road. "You'd know that if you ever came to the garage instead of hovering by the plate glass like a heron."

"I do not hover."

"You hover. Every Tuesday, at the window, with your little thermos."

I turned to the window and watched the hills go by and did not hover, and thought about her saying little thermos like it was something worth remembering.

The motel in Palmerston was the kind with a carport and a plastic sign and a manager who gave us two keys because the booking said one room, and the room said two beds, and then the room itself said otherwise. We stood in the doorway together and looked at the single queen bed in the middle of it.

"Well," Theresa said.

"Well," I said.

I went back to the manager, a patient woman folding towels behind the counter, and asked about a second room. "Fully booked for the rugby," she said. "There's a place two blocks down, you could try there."

I could try there. I could also pay for it out of my own pocket on a weekend I was already giving up, because Muriel's petty cash had closed its doors an hour into the drive. I stood in the carport for a moment doing the arithmetic, and the arithmetic came out the way it always comes out when you are thirty-four and sensible, which was badly.

Theresa was already in the room when I came back. She'd claimed the left side of the bed by dropping her duffel on it, which was apparently how claiming worked in Fischer law.

"I'll sleep on the floor," I said.

"You will not. The bed's huge. Look at it. You could land a plane on that bed."

"I've shared a bed exactly twice in my life and both times were terrible."

"Third time's the charm," she said, and I could not tell if she was joking, and the not knowing sat in my chest all through the training day, through three hours of assessment software and a man named Josh from Invercargill who asked eleven questions about dates fields. Theresa sat across the room in the training and was, annoyingly, good at it. She caught a bug in the scoring module that the presenter hadn't even known about, and I watched her explain it with her hands and hated how much I didn't hate watching her.

Dinner was at a pub with the other attendees, and she drank two beers and I drank one, so we were both clear-headed and mildly bored by nine, and we walked back to the motel in the cold arguing about whether the test route should go past the garage window at all.

"It distracts the candidates," I said.

"It humanizes the examiners. They see us being normal."

"They see you making faces at them, Theresa. The Henderson kid waved back at you and nearly mounted the curb on his third attempt."

"He passed though."

"He passed because I passed him, not because of your face."

"My face," she said, unlocking the motel room door, "is a proven safety feature."

Inside, the argument that had been waiting for us all day finally found its footing, and it was about the thermostat, because of course it was. The room heater was on and the window wouldn't stay shut and the whole thing had the acoustics of a kettle.

"It's twenty-eight degrees in here," I said, flipping the dial down.

"It's freezing. It's Palmerston in spring. Leave it." She flipped it back up.

"I sleep in a cold room. I have always slept in a cold room."

"Well, I don't. I grew up in a house with a heat pump that didn't work and I have opinions about being cold."

"You have opinions about everything."

"Damn right," she said, flipping the dial up again, and I flipped it down, and she flipped it up, and then I put my hand flat over the dial and she put her hand over mine, and that was when the