Pit Stop Pleasure

I was thirty-five years old and had just wasted two hours of my life listening to a man describe his mother's hip surgery in detail, and all I wanted was a beer and somebody who would let me complain about it out loud. That's how I ended up pulling into Rob's shop at nine on a Thursday night, gravel popping under my tires, the roll-up doors wide open and the radio going.

Rob was under the Mustang when I walked in, just his legs sticking out from the side of it, and he slid out when he heard my heels on the concrete. He's thirty-six now, owns the place, has owned it for six years, and he looked at my face and knew before I opened my mouth.

"That bad?" he said, sitting up.

"Rob, I need you to understand something. This man, Dan, his name was Dan, talked about his mother for one full hour. One hour. I timed it on my phone because I thought maybe I was exaggerating, and I was not. Hip surgery, her book club, her feelings about the neighbor's dog. At one point he showed me pictures. Of the dog."

Rob laughed and got up, wiping his hands on a rag that had seen better years. "Sit down. You want a beer? I think there's some left from Saturday."

"I want the cheapest beer you have and your full attention," I said, and I dragged one of the folding chairs over near the open door where the evening air was coming in. The shop smelled like grease and motor oil and, because it was warm out, like the dust that had been baking on the lot all day. I know some people hate that smell but I'd been coming around long enough now, a couple months of slow Thursday nights, that it had started to feel like the smell of not being alone.

Here's how this started, for those of you just tuning in. Rob and I went to college together, and he asked me out once, when he was twenty-two and I was twenty-one, and I said no because I was an idiot and I was hung up on some other guy who never mattered. We stayed friends anyway, the kind of friends who lose touch for years and then pick it back up like it never dropped. My crush on him back then, well. I'm not going to get into all of that tonight. Some things you bury and then you dig them up later when the timing's better.

Rob came back with two cans and set one on the tire next to my chair, and he'd barely sat down when headlights swept across the doors and Luke's old Charger rolled in. Luke is Rob's best friend, thirty-six like Rob, met him back when they were both twenty-three and working at a dealer together. He got out holding a six-pack like he'd read my mind from across town.

"I heard my name," Luke said, coming through the door. "Or I heard complaining, which around here is the same thing."

"Lynne went on a date," Rob said.

"Oh no," Luke said, grinning, and cracked one open and handed it to me before taking one for himself. "Tell us everything. Spare no detail."

So I told them everything, again, with commentary, and Luke laughed so hard at the dog pictures that he almost dropped his beer, and Rob kept shaking his head and saying things like "an hour" under his breath like he couldn't get over it. We ended up dragging a couple of old tires out of the corner and sitting on them by the open doors, which is what we did on slow nights, the three of us arranged like fools on rubber donuts with the Mustang sitting there in the bay all glossy black and half finished.

"Do you remember," Luke said at some point, "that kid in your dorm, Sierra, who put a live chicken in the dean's office?"

"That was a decade and a half ago," I said.

"And you remember it clearly," Rob said, and he was right, I did. We got going on it, the three of us, college gossip from back when Rob and I lived in the same dorm, Luke chiming in on stories he'd heard a hundred times, who dated who, whose truck ended up in the pond, the rumor about the RA that turned out to be completely true, which we will not get into here. Luke was telling the story of the chicken, doing the dean's voice, and Rob was laughing the way he laughs, head back, and I sat there on my tire thinking that this was already a better night than the date had been, and it wasn't even costing me anything.

The talk drifted, the way it does. Luke asked if I was going to try the dating apps again after Dan. I said probably, eventually, in the way you say it when the answer is no. Rob looked at the Mustang and said the engine goes in next month if the parts guy ever calls him back. Luke said the parts guy never calls anybody back, he owes Rob money and a manifold.

"He owes you a manifold?" I said.

"Two manifolds," Rob said. "It's a whole thing."

Somewhere in there it got later and the air cooled off a little and Luke finished his beers and stood up, stretching, saying he had an early one, some customer's GTO coming in at seven even though it wasn't his shop, he just liked being there for other people's money. He pointed the neck of his empty bottle at me on his way out.

"Next Thursday," he said. "You bring the story, I'll bring the beer."

"It's a system," I said, and he laughed and waved and his headlights swept the lot again and then it was quiet, just the radio and the two of us.

Rob got up to close half the door, the night air having done its job, and I stood too, because it was that time, the time when you say goodnight and then sit in your car for ten minutes before you actually drive home, or maybe that's just me. He walked me partway to my car, hands in his pockets, and we did the usual slow goodnight, the kind where neither person is in a hurry.

"Hey," he said. "For what it's worth, Dan sounds like a waste of a Thursday."

"The biggest waste of a Thursday on record."

"You could've been here listening to us argue about manifolds instead."

"That would have been a better use of my time, honestly."

We were at my car by then, and he said goodnight, and when he said it he reached out like he was going to hug me the way he sometimes did, and instead his hand came down and brushed along the outside of my thigh, just once, light, from mid-thigh down toward my knee, and it was nothing, it was absolutely nothing, a gesture, the kind of thing a hand does on the way past.

Except it wasn't nothing and we both knew it wasn't nothing, because I didn't move away and he didn't pretend it was an accident. His hand rested there a second longer than it needed to, warm even through my jeans, and then he took it back and put it in his pocket again and looked at me.

"Goodnight, Lynne," he said.

"Goodnight, Rob," I said, and my voice came out normal, which I counted as a personal achievement.

I got in the car and sat there, like I said I do, and watched him walk back into the lit rectangle of the shop, and I thought about the fact that I had said no to this man fourteen years ago and had spent a good chunk of this year wondering if the window was closed or just stuck. The hand on my thigh said the window had a crowbar in it somewhere.

I drove home with the radio off, which I never do.

* * *

The next Thursday I showed up at eight instead of nine, and I didn't even pretend it was about the beer. Luke was already there with a twelve pack this time, because he said the quality of my dating stories demanded it, and I told them about the second date I'd suffered through that week, a woman this time, nice, but she talked about her ex the entire meal, and Luke said everyone at this shop had terrible luck and we should just give up and Rob said something quiet into his beer that I pretended not to hear.

The Mustang was further along. The new manifold was on, the one that had finally shown up, and Rob had the hood propped and was explaining to Luke why he wasn't putting the air cleaner on yet, and I stood next to them listening to words I mostly understood now and feeling like I belonged to something.

"You want to help wax it Saturday?" Rob asked me, casual, eyes on the engine. "She's coming out of paint prep and I want a good coat on her before the show in June."

"Waxing a car," I said. "That's real work."

"It's a dare," Luke said. "He doesn't think you'll show."

"Rob doesn't think I'll show?" I said, and looked at Rob, who had the good grace to look at his manifold instead of at me.

"Saturday, ten o'clock," he said. "Bring your own beer and I'll supply the wax."

I said I'd be there. I was already planning what jeans to wear, which is a thing I will admit here because you all know where this is headed anyway.

He wiped his hands on a rag and said come here, I want to show you something, and I went around to the front of the car where he had the hood propped open and the work light hanging off a hook so the engine bay was lit up like a stage. He started pointing things out, the new manifold, the valve covers he'd painted himself, the firewall where he still had wiring to sort out, and I nodded along and asked questions and he answered them, patient, the way he always did, like my questions were good questions even when they weren't. Then I leaned in to look at something on the far side and he stepped in behind me to point past my shoulder, and his chest came up against my back, and he just kept talking. He kept talking about spark plug gaps with his whole front pressed along my back and his breath on my ear, and we both knew it and said nothing, and I stood there and let it happen and listened to maybe one word in four.

"Follow the fuel line down," he said, and his arm came around me to trace it, and I could feel him through his coveralls, solid and warm, and my brain was doing that thing where it splits in two and one half is narrating and the other half is just standing very still hoping the moment doesn't end. "You see how it routes around the back of the block. That took me a week to figure out."

"A week," I managed.

"A week. And then the fitting leaked and I had to do it again."

I laughed, or made a sound near a laugh, and he straightened up but he didn't step back, and for a second we were just standing there with my back