Two Old Stick Shifters

Ian watched the weather balloon climb over the chain-link fence while Pierre stalled the sedan for the third time that morning.

"You let the clutch out too fast," Ian said. "Again."

"I know, I know." Pierre, twenty-eight, wiped his palms on his jeans. "The station is quiet, the road is quiet, I am the problem."

"You're not the problem. You're new at it. There's a difference." Ian nodded at the balloon. "That thing goes up every morning at nine, rain or shine. Somebody out there has worse mornings than you."

Pierre looked up at it. "It just floats. Like it isn't even working."

"It's working plenty. It just makes it look easy." Ian glanced at his watch. "We're done for today. Practice the biting point in your head tonight. Feet, not hands."

"Third try," Pierre said, mostly to himself. "The test is in June. I can do this."

"You can. Go to work."

Pierre gathered his backpack and headed for the weather station's side door, where he'd left his bike locked to a drainpipe. Ian watched him go, then watched the balloon shrink to a dot against a sky the color of cheap dishes. Eastern New Brunswick in May, and the wind off the water still had teeth in it.

He walked to his truck, which sat at the far end of the lot the way he liked it, nose out for a fast exit. That was twenty years of long-haul routes talking. You parked for the exit, always.

A man was standing by the passenger door.

He was maybe forty-seven, silver at the temples, wearing a jacket that had seen better decades. He held a screwdriver in one hand like it was a formal accessory. He had the settled, unhurried look of someone who had been waiting a while and didn't mind.

"You're the driving instructor," the man said. "Ian, right? Chandler Wilton from Mapleview gave me your card. Said you'd be up here Tuesdays."

"I'm up here Tuesdays because the lot's empty," Ian said. "Who are you?"

"Tom Kirby." He didn't offer a hand, which Ian appreciated, because his own were cold. "I bought a house on the crescent in March. And I bought a car I cannot drive, which is a problem I created for myself at an auction, which is my line of work, so I can't even blame anybody else."

"Auctioneer," Ian said.

"Forty-seven years old and I've spent my whole life selling other people's cars and never learned to drive one with a stick." Tom held up the screwdriver. "And now there's a further problem, but let's start with the big one. Do you take adult students?"

"Sometimes. Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether they show up sober, on time, and don't argue with me about the clutch."

Tom smiled. He had a good smile, the kind that suggested he'd spent years talking fast in large rooms and had learned exactly what it was worth. "I can promise two out of three, and I'll negotiate hard on the third."

Ian didn't smile back, on principle. "What's the screwdriver for?"

"Ah." Tom's face did something complicated. "That's the further problem. Can I show you? It's the beige sedan over there, the one that looks like it lost a fight."

"The Sunbird?"

"That's the one. Two hundred and sixty dollars at a farm estate surplus sale. Four-speed. Beautiful shape for its age. And last week the gear knob came loose in my hand while my nephew was visiting, and now it wobbles, and I've been afraid to drive it since, which is also why I need lessons, because what little skill I had is draining away with fear."

Ian looked at the sedan. Then at Tom. "Chandler sent you."

"He did," Tom said. "He's been at my door three times about the potluck committee. I think he trades favors the way other men trade baseball cards."

"He trades them the way other men trade insults." Ian unlocked his truck. "What are you offering? I don't work for free."

"I don't expect you to. What do you charge?"

"Forty an hour."

"Fair." Tom reached into his jacket and produced a small cloth roll, the kind Ian's grandmother had kept sewing needles in. He unrolled it on the truck's tailgate. Inside, nested in faded flannel, sat a set of brass key fobs, old ones, the heavy kind with a horse's head stamped on one and a monogram on the other. They had gone brown-gold with age.

"From the same estate," Tom said. "Pre-war, probably. Brass, solid, no plating. I can't sell them, they're not worth enough to list and they're too nice to scrap. I thought maybe you'd want them. As payment in kind. Or partial payment, and cash for the rest."

Ian looked at them. He didn't need brass key fobs. He needed exactly nothing, which was a condition he'd been living with comfortably since his last close friend moved to Winnipeg three years ago and stopped calling back.

But there was something about the horse's head.

"That's a strange way to pay for driving lessons," he said, and picked up the horse fob before he'd finished deciding to. It had a good weight. "Fine. This, plus thirty cash an hour, and you show up when you say you will."

"Done." Tom rolled up the empty cloth the way a man closes a deal. "When can we start?"

"You just did. Get in. Passenger side. We're using my truck first, then we'll see about the Sunbird."

* * *

The trouble with the Sunbird, they discovered twenty minutes later, was worse than a loose knob.

Tom had insisted on trying his own car, which Ian understood. A man wants to fix what he bought. So they ran drills in the weather station lot, the anemometer spinning slow circles behind the fence, the satellite dish pointed at some corner of the sky like a dog that had heard its name. Tom stalled it twice getting out of his own parking area, which Ian let slide, and then on his third attempt at second gear the shift went hard, the engine barked, and the car bucked and died.

And the gear knob came off in Tom's hand.

Not loose. Off. The knob rose into the air like a cork out of a bottle, and Tom held it up and looked at the bare steel shaft underneath with the expression of a man who has just found a fish in his washing machine.

"Well," he said.

"Don't move." Ian leaned across from the passenger seat. There was something wedged down inside the shaft. He could see the corner of it, dark and square. He fished with two fingers, and out it came, reluctant as a splinter.

A floppy disk. An actual three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, with a handwritten label gone soft at the edges. It read, in ballpoint: KIRBY ESTATE SALE, MAY.

"That's not possible," Tom said.

"Everything's possible. Somebody jammed it down there." Ian turned it over. "On purpose or by accident, I couldn't say. When did you buy this thing?"

"Two weeks ago. The estate sale was the seller's, but the car came from the surplus lot out back." Tom took the knob from his own hand and stared at it. "Wait. Kirby Estate Sale. May. That's my sale. That's my handwriting."

Ian looked at the label again. It did say Kirby. "Yours."

"My first auction. Ever. Twenty years ago, I ran an estate sale in Sackville and I cataloged the inventory on my sister's laptop because I couldn't afford one, and I backed it up on floppies because that's what you did." He was turning the disk over and over. "This is the backup. This is the catalog from the first sale I ever ran. I went through every box from my storage unit last month looking for this disk, and I have been looking for it for years, and it was in the gearshift of a car I bought for two hundred and sixty dollars."

"That's a hell of a coincidence," Ian said.

"That's not a coincidence, that's an inheritance." Tom laughed, and it was a real laugh, the unguarded kind. "Do you know what this is worth to me? Nothing, financially. Everything, personally. It's the first thing I was ever good at, on a disk, in a knob."

Ian pocketed the disk without thinking about it, the way you pocket a coin that lands heads. He realized he'd done it a half-second later and held it back out. "Here."

"Keep it for now," Tom said. "My hands are full of knob." He looked at the knob, then at Ian. "That sounded better in my head."

* * *

They left the Sunbird in the lot, since it was legally parked on government-adjacent land and neither of them wanted to drive it stickless, and Ian drove them down the hill to a coffee shop on the main road, the kind with a laminated menu and a tip jar with a joke written on it. Tom paid for both coffees before Ian could argue, which Ian logged as a debt to be settled later, because he kept books in his head and always had.

They took the table by the window. Outside, a delivery truck idled. Inside, a radio played something from the eighties at a volume meant to be ignored.

"The knob," Ian said. "I can fix that. Epoxy and a set screw, ten minutes."

"You'd do that?"

"I'd supervise while you do it. That's the lesson plan. You break it, you fix it."

"Fair." Tom reached for the sugar, which sat at the corner of the table near Ian's elbow, and his hand came close to Ian's hand on the way. Close enough that Ian felt the warmth off it, or imagined he did, which amounted to the same thing at his age. Tom took two sugars, unhurried, and his knuckles brushed the table an inch from Ian's fingers, and then he sat back and stirred.

Ian looked at his own coffee. He felt his face go warm, which annoyed him, because he was fifty-three years old and had sat in blizzards and breakdown lanes without flushing about anything, and here he was pink over a sugar bowl.

He said nothing. He drank his coffee, which was too hot, and thought about the horse's head on the brass fob in his pocket, and about how long it had been since anyone's hand had come near his on a table in the middle of a Tuesday.

"Chandler says you never married," Tom said.

"Chandler says a lot of things."

"He also says you make the best chili at the potluck, which I notice is not a compliment you've been asked to confirm."

Ian snorted into his cup. "The chili is real. The marriage part is also real. Both facts, no connection between them."

"For now," Tom said, and stirred his sugar, and smiled at the window instead of at him, which Ian found easier to sit with than the direct version.

They fetched the Sunbird after coffee, Ian driving it the six blocks to the crescent with a pair of vise grips clamped on the bare shaft, which he would not recommend to anyone. Tom's garage was cleaner than Ian expected, which he took as a personal affront on principle. There was a workbench with a pegboard, and the pegboard had outlines painted behind each tool so you could see if one was missing. Ian had only ever seen that in the shops of men who had wives with standards.

"You married?" Ian asked, nodding at the pegboard.

"Widower going on six years," Tom said. He had the Sunbird parked nose-in, which bugged Ian, and a kit of epoxy and set screws laid out on a rag. "You?"

"Never." He picked up the set screw packet and read the size