Envy the Night

3

__________

Jerry was staring at Nora’s ass again, in that way he had where his eyes seemed to bug right out of his head, nothing subtle about it, but she wondered if she was allowed to care today—she’d done the same thing that morning as she got dressed, looking her butt over in the mirror like some sort of sorority girl instead of a woman with wrench calluses on her palms. You did something like that, could you get upset when a guy allowed himself a stare? Maybe she’d earned the leer. Karma.

The glance in the mirror was important, though, a morning reminder that Nora was still very much a woman. This before putting on the jeans and the heavy work shirt, tucking her hair into a baseball cap so it wouldn’t hang free and invite a painful accident. She’d learned that lesson one afternoon when she’d used the creeper to check up on Jerry’s work and rolled right over her own hair. Stafford Collision and Custom was open by seven thirty, and from then until six or six thirty when she shut the doors and turned the locks, Nora would interact with few females. It was a man’s business, always had been, but she liked the touch she brought to it and thought the customers did, too. Granted, they were her father’s customers and probably kept returning more out of loyalty—and pity—for Bud Stafford than for his daughter, but the shop still did good work. On those rare afternoons when a particularly difficult job was done and the car driven out of the shop, Nora might even let herself believe they did a better job now. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, of course, but she did have an eye for detail that her father couldn’t touch. Too bad an eye for detail wasn’t enough to keep the bills paid.

The phone rang out in the office, and Nora straightened up and looked back at Jerry, who promptly flushed and averted his eyes. Even when you didn’t catch Jerry, he thought you had. Jerry would’ve made a piss-poor criminal.

“I’d like you to take another pass over that front quarter panel,” Nora said.

“Huh?”

“Nice orange-peel finish in the paint, Jerry. I know you can see that, and you know how I feel about it. Doesn’t matter if it disappears in the shadows, you can see it in the sun, and that’s when people care about their cars looking the best. They go home and the first sunny Saturday morning they wash the car and wax it and see that orange peel. And then you know what happens? They don’t come back.”

She walked away from him, got into the office just in time to grab the phone before it rang over to voice mail. She was always forgetting to take the cordless handset out into the shop with her, and she knew they’d lost business because of it. When a body shop doesn’t answer, people just call the next one in the phone book; they don’t wait and try again. She’d been one ring away from losing this call.

“Stafford Collision and Custom, this is Nora Stafford.”

She sat on the edge of the desk and took notes on one of the old pads that still had Bud Stafford’s name across the top. The caller wanted a tow truck for two cars that had wrecked up on County Y. Her last tow driver, who’d also been a prep man and part-time painter, had picked up a drunk driving charge three months back and to keep him would have required bearing an insurance rate spike that she simply couldn’t handle. In reality it was a welcome break—the shop’s financial situation was going to dictate firing somebody anyhow, and the drunk driving charge gave her an excuse. She’d let him go and couldn’t afford to hire a replacement. But two cars—including a Lexus—that was business she couldn’t turn down, either. Jerry could drive the tow truck, but he wasn’t covered by the insurance policy, and she needed him to finish repainting that Mazda this morning. She’d have to handle this one herself.

She got the details of the wreck’s position and promised to be out within twenty minutes, then went back into the shop and told Jerry where she was going. He just grunted in response, not looking at her.

“What’s the problem, Jerry?”

“Problem?” He dropped the rag that was in his hands. “Problem should be pretty obvious. You got me wasting all my time repainting work I shouldn’t have had to paint in the first place.”

She waved a hand at him, tired already, the argument by now just like the dying water heater in her house— too familiar, too annoying, too expensive to fix.

Jerry was a body man, a fine body man, none better in town. Didn’t have the eyes for a top-quality paint job, but that wasn’t the problem so much as the way he felt disrespected when asked to paint. If she could afford to bring someone else on board, she would, but that explanation hadn’t appeased him.

“Jerry, this is not a big deal. If you’d done it right the first time, I wouldn’t have asked you to repaint it. Instead, you half-assed the job and then tried to make up for it with the buffer, like usual.”

“Damn it, Nora, last time I painted cars it was with—”

“Single-stage lacquer, spray it on, buff it pretty, don’t have to mess with no damn clear coat . . .”

Nora mocked his voice perfectly, capturing the drawl so dead-on that Jerry pulled back in anger and grabbed his rag again, tightened his fist around it. He was a small man, only a few inches taller than she was, but strong in the wiry way that comes from years of physical labor. What was left of his hair was thin and brown and damp with sweat.

“All right,” he said. “So I’ve told you before, if you remember all that. Think you’re clever saying it back to me, I ’spose. But if you was clever you’d understand, instead of using it to make fun of me. Your daddy understood. I’m not a combination man. I do body work. Been doing it since back when you was playing with dolls and putting on training bras and learning to paint your nails.”

Same old shit. He’d start bitching about his workload, then begin with his what-a-pretty-little-girl-you-are routine, slighting her gender either directly or with what he thought passed as slick humor.

“Tell you something, Jerry? When I was learning to paint my nails, I was also learning how to paint a car. Now it’s time that you do.”

She turned and walked away from him, heard the bitch muttered under his breath and kept on going, out of the shop and into the tow truck. Sat behind the wheel and let the engine warm and lifted her hands to her face and thought, I would’ve cried about this. A year ago, maybe even six months ago, I would’ve cried.

Not any more, though. No way. But was that entirely a good thing?

She wasn’t going to think about it. Pointless exercise. What she needed to think about was the cars waiting for her up on County Y. That was more than a pleasant surprise—it was salvation. She’d spent the morning trying to determine which bills she could be late on. It was down to that now, down to creating a rotating schedule of missed payments because otherwise she simply could not keep the doors open. Now here was a phone call offering enough work to keep those wolves distracted, if not completely at bay. And to think, she’d been one ring away from missing it altogether.

It felt longer than twenty minutes. The gray-haired guy kept up a constant stream of chatter, the words sounding more nervous each time there was a pause, as if he were scared of silence. When a car passed by, though, he’d stammer the way you do when you lose your train of thought, stare intently at the vehicle until it was out of sight. A couple of times, people slowed and put their windows down, ready to offer help, and the gray-haired guy just waved them off and shouted that everything was fine, go on, have a nice day.

It was a hell of a nice day, though. If the Lexus driver would shut up for a few minutes, Frank wouldn’t have minded it at all, standing out here. It had been a long time since he’d lived in the city, so it wasn’t as if he’d arrived in the woods fresh from garbage-riddled streets that stunk of exhaust fumes. Even so, this place felt different. For one thing, there wasn’t a building in sight. Turn right, turn left, see trees and blue sky, nothing else. A pair of hawks rode the air currents high above, staying on the south side of the road. Must be a clearing back there, something offering prime hunting ground for the birds. Frank could’ve watched them for a long time, if this jazzed-up dude would let him. Instead, he was busy fending off meaningless questions and observations.

He was relieved when he saw the tow truck at the eastern end of the road, and a minute later it had pulled up beside them. The driver opened the door, and Frank felt his eyes narrow, saw matching surprise on the gray- haired man’s face. The driver was a woman, and a good-looking one, that much evident even with her face shadowed by a baseball cap. She hopped down onto the road—the truck was too high for her to just step out; she