Page 11 of Diesel

Glancing at the toolbox, I spotted several with red handles. “This one?”

“Other one. Smaller.”

I grabbed what I hoped was the right tool and handed it over. Our fingers brushed during the exchange. I pretended not to notice the way my skin tingled at the contact.

“So you work for Speed Escapades?” Diesel worked the ratchet with steady movements.

“Yeah. About six months now.”

“Like it?”

“More than I expected to. The seniors are...” I searched for the right word. “Memorable. Loud. Occasionally trying to set me up with their teenage relatives.”

He paused, glancing at me. “Teenage relatives?”

“Greta’s grandson. She’s very persistent. I’m very law-abiding.”

“Good priorities.” He returned his attention to the engine, but I caught the edge of a smile. “What’d you do before this?”

“Retail. Various stores, various positions, all equally soul-crushing.” I leaned against the workbench and watched him work. “This is better. At least I’m outside, and the seniors are entertaining even when they’re driving me crazy.”

“Fair trade-off.”

I thought so. “What about you? Always been a mechanic?”

“Since I was sixteen. Started working on motorcycles with my dad, moved to cars.” He pulled something free from the engine—the dead alternator, presumably—and set it on the workbench.

It looked even more spidery up close.

“That thing looks like it got pulled out of a junkyard,” I said.

“Alternators don’t usually fail this dramatically unless something else was already wrong.” He grabbed a new alternator from a shelf, all shiny and no gunk. “This should last you a good while. As long as you don’t ignore weird noises.”

“Does Walter count as weird noises?” I constantly checked my rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t morphing into Venom. The guy needed more fiber in his diet.

“No.” Diesel smirked. If he kept doing that, I wasn’t going to survive the next few hours. I was barely surviving how good he smelled.

Lowering my gaze, I noticed his scarred knuckles. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. Or possibly bar fights.

“You always this quiet when you watch people work?” he asked without looking up.

“Usually I’m talking someone out of buying seventeen cans of tuna they don’t need. This is a nice change of pace.”

“Seventeen cans?”

“Minus twelve.”

“Edith.”

Diesel remembered my grey-haired rebels. The Flatulent Five. Why did that touch me in all my soft spots? Because they didn’t really have anyone. Greta had a grandson she was trying to get me arrested over, but I knew she put more into their relationship than he did. Irene’s daughter stayed on top of her mom’s health because she didn’t want the burden of taking care of an aging parent. They might be a handful, but in the six months that I’d known them, they’d started to feel like family.

He grabbed another tool from the box and reached back into the engine. “Your crew seems like a handful.”

“They’re the best kind of handful. The kind that keeps threatening to set me up but also brought me cookies when I had the flu last month.”

“Sounds like family.”

“Better than, in some cases.” In my case particularly since they were pretty much the only family I had. They were rough around the edges, but that was what happened when the family you raised and the life you’d lived left you with nothing but quiet.