when the engine stalls, we listen

I'm Iris Marten, twenty-four, and I've been hauling parts for Hartwell's Auto out on Route 9 for three years now. My hands are shot from it, cracked knuckles and grease in the lines of my palms no soap gets out. The money's thin. The hours are worse. But the nights, that's where things got complicated, and complicated started with Ren Tanaka.

Ren is twenty-six. He wrenches for the Dwyer drag team, pit crew, and he's been fixing whatever broken heap I drag into the shop for the better part of a year. Somewhere in there we went from him handing me a receipt to him handing me his toothbrush, and honestly I couldn't tell you the date it happened. That's the problem right there. I could tell you the date of every delivery run I've made since I turned twenty-one and got this job, but I couldn't tell you when we became a we.

I do remember the night we first slept together, because that one stuck.

It was last spring, a Friday, and I'd broken down on the county road with a load of rear ends in the flatbed. Called the shop and Ren came out in the tow truck instead of the road service guy, which should have been my first clue. It was past midnight. We got the flatbed chained up and then we sat in the tow truck cab waiting for the winch to do its thing, and the cab smelled like diesel and his sweat, and he reached over and put his hand on my wrist.

Just my wrist. His thumb moved over the pulse point as if checking something.

"You cold?" he asked.

"No," I said. My voice came out wrong, lower than I meant it.

"You sure? You look cold."

"I'm sure, Ren."

He kept his hand there anyway. I didn't pull away. I remember thinking, clear as anything, this man wants me, just tonight, just right now, and God help me I wanted to be wanted like that so bad it embarrassed me. We'd been dancing around each other for months by then. Every delivery, every pickup, he'd find some reason to talk to me. Check this, hold that, you got a minute. And I'd find reasons to take the long way to the track.

"Tell me to stop and I stop," he said.

"Don't stop," I told him, and he didn't. That was the first night. There were plenty after, but that first one, his hand on my wrist in the dark, that's the one I go back to when I can't sleep.

Here's what I didn't see coming. Getting together didn't fix anything. It just moved the problem into my apartment.

***

Saturday morning at the shop. The big roll door was up and the desert light came in sideways, all that dust hanging in it like the air itself was dirty. Ren was under the Dwyer car, on his back on the creeper, and I came in with the morning paperwork. He'd left his jacket on my side of the bench. That's the kind of thing that used to make me smile.

"Sign-off sheet," I said, and held it out.

He took it without looking up. Signed it one-handed, still turning his wrench. Didn't say thanks, didn't say good morning, didn't say did you sleep okay. The sheet came back to me and his signature was on it and that was all I got out of the exchange.

I stood there a second longer than I should have. He kept working. The wrench clicked. Somewhere across the shop Esme was running the grinder and the noise filled up all the empty space where a conversation should've been.

"Ren."

"Hm."

"You could look at me. When I'm talking to you. It's kind of a normal person thing."

"I'm under a car, Iris." Flat. Not mean, just flat, like I'd asked him to admire the ceiling.

So I did the thing I probably shouldn't have. I took the clipboard and shoved it into his chest, hard enough that the creeper rolled back an inch and his head thunked lightly on the undercarriage.

"Ow. What the hell?"

"You know what the hell. I've been coming here four, five times a week for three years. We've been sleeping together for six months. And I get less out of you than I get out of the coffee machine, and the coffee machine at least makes a noise when I want something."

He sat up on the creeper, wiped his hands on a rag that made them dirtier, and looked at me then. Finally. Something moved behind his eyes and I couldn't name it.

"That's not fair," he said.

"Probably not. But it's how it feels, so."

He opened his mouth and Hartwell's voice came across the shop floor and saved him, the way bosses do.

"Iris! My office. Bring your coffee, you'll want to sit."

***

Old man Hartwell ran the place since before I was born, though he swears he sold it to his nephew in 2019 and just hangs around. His office is a closet with a desk, and the desk has a fan and three taxidermy fish and a picture of a car I'm pretty sure never existed.

"Sit," he said. I sat.

"Got a rush order. Transmission internals, the good stuff, for the Herrera team. Track's outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Their box blew up Thursday night and their race is in eight days."

"That's two states over," I said.

"It is."

"That's a sixteen, seventeen hour run with a loaded flatbed."

"It is."

"And you're telling me this on a Saturday morning."

"Load's too heavy for you to handle alone at the other end. Crated gears, you can't muscle those off a bed by yourself, you'll end up in a hospital and me in a lawsuit. So Tanaka rides with you. He can be spared, Dwyer's engine build is done."

I looked at him. "You want me to spend a weekend in a truck with my..." I stopped, because we hadn't exactly made announcements.

"With your whatever he is," Hartwell said, not unkind. "I want the parts in Roswell by Monday morning. That is the entire assignment. Settle your expenses sheet before you go, per diem is already approved, so it's clean. Get it done and there's a bonus in it."

Great. Money settled up front, at least. That's one thing about Hartwell, he pays you before he asks you for anything, which is more than most outfits.

"When do we leave?"

"Tonight. Beat the heat through the desert stretches. Truck's gassed."

I walked out of the office and the shop was quieter than before, the grinder off, and Ren was standing by the bench holding his rag like he didn't know what to do with it. He'd heard. Of course he'd heard, Hartwell doesn't have an indoor voice.

"Two states," Ren said.

"Two states," I said. "Sixteen hours. In the flatbed. Together."

He was quiet a minute. "I'll pack light."

"You do that."

And I went to sign out the expense sheet, and my hands were shaking a little, and I couldn't tell if it was the road ahead or the sixteen hours in a cab with a man who couldn't look at me while he signed his own name.

We pulled out of the lot at nine that night, the flatbed heavy and the cab smelling like old coffee and diesel. Ren had a duffel bag and a paper sack of food Esme made him take, and he rode with his elbow on the door and his window cracked even though the night was already cool.

For the first hour we did okay. Small stuff. He asked about the route, I told him, he nodded, I played a radio station until it turned to static somewhere past the county line and neither of us reached to change it. That's how it goes with us. Silence isn't uncomfortable exactly, it's just the furniture. You live around it.

By hour three the desert had gone black on both sides and the cab light from the dash made his face look carved out of something. He'd dozed a little, woke up, checked his phone, put it away. I drank bad gas station coffee and watched the yellow line come at me.

"You always drive this quiet?" he asked, out of nowhere.

"I drive how I drive. You always sleep in trucks like you're getting paid for it?"

He almost smiled. Then it went away and he said, "You've been quiet since the office. Since before the office, if I'm honest. You shoved a clipboard into my chest today, Iris."

"You noticed that, huh."

"I noticed."

"Well, good for you. Observant." I gripped the wheel and watched a pair of headlights come up slow in the mirror, pass us, drop away. "Maybe I figured a sixteen hour ride was a hell of a time to finally have a conversation. Or maybe I figured it wouldn't happen at all. Either way, here we are."

"See, that's what I mean."

"That's what you mean about what?"

"You're always running." He said it plain, not mean, the way he says most things, and somehow that made it worse. "You run parts, you run errands, you run to the track, you run home. Even now, look at it. They said jump, you were gone before they finished the sentence."

"That's a job, Ren. Jobs pay money."

"That's not what I'm saying and you know it." He shifted in the seat to face me a little. "A year I've watched you come through that shop. Three years, whatever it is. You never sit still long enough for anything to catch up to you. Not Hartwell, not the crew, not me."

The headlights swept the road again. Somewhere out there a coyote or the wind or something made a noise and quit.

"And what's catching up that I'm dodging, you got a theory? You always got a theory."

"Yeah," he said. "I got one."

"Let's hear it then."

"You're scared. You keep the wheels turning because as long as you're moving you don't have to look at what you've got. And I think you know it, and I think that's why you shoved the clipboard instead of just talking."

I should have let it go. That's the smart move, the move I always make, let it go, drive on, wake up tomorrow and it's Tuesday and nobody said anything permanent. Instead I heard myself go, "You want to talk about running? You? You fix a car and go back under the next one so nobody can ask you a damn question. I had to shove paperwork into your ribs to get eye contact this morning. You live under cars, Ren. At least my running has a destination."

The cab got real quiet. I could hear the tires on the seams in the pavement, a tick, tick, tick, like a clock nobody asked for.

"That's fair," he said finally.

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Agree with me in that flat voice like it's over. Like we just filed it and moved on." My eyes were burning and I blamed the coffee, out loud, which fooled nobody. "God. I hate this road. I hate this whole state."

"Pull over if you're that mad."

"I'm not mad. That's the problem, I don't even know what I am." I took the next exit mostly because my hands decided to, and there was a diner off the ramp with half its sign lit, the R and the E and a dying O. PARK RE, it said. I parked. We sat in the idling truck and the engine ticked and neither of us moved.

"Come on," Ren said. "Coffee. You can be mad at me indoors."

"I'm not mad."

"Indoors anyway."

We went in. The place had three tables occupied, a guy asleep over a newspaper, two truckers watching a muted TV, a waitress older than Hartwell who looked like she'd seen every kind of night there was and had stopped filing them. We took the corner booth. Ren ordered two coffees without asking me, which I was going to be annoyed about, except it was exactly what I wanted, which was more annoying.

The coffee came burnt and thin. Perfect. I wrapped my hands around the mug and stared into it like it owed me something.

"You want to know why I don't sit still," I said.

"You don't have to."

"I'm going to anyway, so shut up." I took a breath and it shook a little on the way in. "I'm scared that if I stop, there's nothing there. That is the entire thing. That's it. I've been going since I was twenty-one, hauling this, hauling that, four, five trips a week, and I don't stop because I don't know what's under me if I do. I think if I sat down someplace quiet and actually looked, I'd find out I built nothing. No people, no place, no... nothing. Just a route and a coffee machine that makes more noise than my boyfriend."

He didn't say anything right away. He turned his mug a quarter