The Mechanic

“When though?” I was pacing, a roller in one hand, the other keeping my phone pressed to my ear. On the other end, my best friend Linda was positively groaning.

“Holy shit Lexy, just call him, alright? And be like ‘Hey it’s Alexia, just called to check on the car’ and let him talk about the car and then be like ‘Oh, awesome, thanks so much, say do you wanna grab a cup of coffee sometime?’ Boom, done. It’s not that hard.” I could almost hear her rolling her eyes over her just painted nails.

“But he just said ‘tomorrow’ and that could be tonight or noon or this morning, and I don’t wanna call too early, yknow? That’s just weird—” I picked at a paint spot on my old acid wash jeans, frowning as Linda let out an exasperated screech.

“It doesn’t matter, you’ve established yourself pretty firmly as ‘weird’ yesterday already haven’t you? I’m pretty sure he won’t be surprised by anything you do, ever.”

“Shut up.” I checked the clock propped up against the bare kitchen counter. The marble tops would come in next week. 2:51PM, three minutes from when I got to the auto shop yesterday. Linda was saying something about me being stupid.

“Mkay, I’ll call you back okay?” My palms were already getting sweaty and it was just a damn phone call.

“Lex, are you gonna call?” She sounded surprised. I frowned as the clock ticked off another minute.

“Maybe, I dunno. I gotta go.” I pressed my palm to my thigh in an attempt to dry it of the dampness. Another minute. I clicked off the phone, took three deep breaths and dialed the number, which I had memorized from the number of times I’d read it to myself the night before, pressing the phone to my ear before I could back out. It rang twice before someone picked up.

“Wow, punctual.”

The words, so many words that I had lined up so perfectly in my head up until that very moment, dissipated in a singular poof of mist which proceeded to clouded my brain, preventing any hope of coherent thought.

“Hello? Alexia?” Only then, when I heard the slight twinge of insecurity invade his voice that I snapped out of my stupor enough to respond.

“Yeah, I was just calling to ask about the car? Like you told me to. Yesterday. So yeah, erm… how’s the car?” The words came out too fast, consonants tripping over the rounds of vowels, letter tails trailing into other words, in one single beaded string of syllables. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that it didn’t sound too ridiculous.

Over the line, I could hear his laughter, as easy and light as if he were standing in my kitchen, laughing right next to me.

“Well, good news and bad news, which do you want to hear first?”

I pursed my lips, sure that he could hear my heart thumping though the receiver because I sure as hell could hear it in my own ears.

“Bad first.”

A chuckle, “Alright, the bad news is that it’s gonna take a while to drag your dad’s poor cherry back from the other side—I need to replace almost half the parts and with a model that old, some of the parts are going to be hard to find, but it’s not impossible. It’ll cost a metric ton,” here he paused, as if to appreciate his own joke and I couldn’t help smiling, “But it’s definitely not impossible.”

I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. The light static pressed in on my ear as I breathed, calibrating my next words carefully, “That doesn’t sound too bad to me.”

“Well, the thing is, when I said a while, I meant a while… say a month and a half, even two. It’s not going to be a week-long job.”

“Oh.”

“Right.”

Another silence.

“And the good news?” I asked, wondering what could possibly be good about being car-less for the next month and a half to two months in California, where not having a car was the equivalent of being a home-stuck cripple.

“The good news,” he sounded a bit too smug, “Is that I got us reservations at Josie’s, and they’re making their special pulled pork tonight.”

“What?” The implications of what he’d said bashed its head against the solid brick of my brain, which was determined not to understand anything save for the simplest of sentences.

Across the line, Liam puffed out a semi exasperated sigh, “Dinner. Tonight. Us. Yes?”

“Why?” In retrospect, I might as well have hung up the phone then and there but I was glad I didn’t. Because the groan that echoed through the phone had my mind wheeling for days afterwards, imagining a hundred other scenarios in which that sound would have been so much more appropriate.

“Because,” and now he was beginning to sound like a stern kindergarten teacher attempting to explain something very basic to a particularly hardheaded child, “I’d like to see you tonight, Alexia, and I’d like very much for you to join me for dinner at Josie’s.”

“Okay,” I breathed, a smile splitting my face despite all my efforts to keep myself calm. We were going to go to dinner. Liam and I were going to go to dinner. Liam wants to take me to—

“Is that an ‘okay, I understand’ or ‘okay, I’ll go with you’?” His voice held the slightest lilt of a tease and I could hear the smirk hinging off the end of his words, flickering over his lips as he held the phone between his shoulder and ear, hands probably occupied with some complicated car part, arms bare and slick with grease.

“Yes,” I said, still lost in the image. This time, he really did sound exasperated.

“Alexia—”

“I’ll go with you, yes, I’ll go, yes.” Thumpthumpthumpthump I swore my heart was going to skip right out of my throat and I’d have to cancel our plans for emergency heart replacement surgery.

“Alright then,” he sounded pleased, “I’ll pick you up around seven?”

“Yes, okay, yes.” I chewed at my lips, fighting the urge to throw the phone clean across the room and run off the edge of a cliff somewhere.

“Yes, okay,” he teased, voice saturated with amusement.

“Stop making fun of me.”

“Stop makin’ it so easy.”

“I can’t.” Sometime between picking up the phone and now, I’d slid down the height of the kitchen cabinets to the ground, sitting with my back against the yet unpainted doors of the cupboards below the sink. Liam’s laugh was bright in the empty space of the kitchen, filling the monochromatic walls with its sound.

“Then I can’t stop teasin’ you.”

“Why not?” I felt myself relaxing into the crook between the cabinets and the ground, crossing my legs, phone resting on my shoulder as I picked absently at random splotches of dried paint on my pants.

“Like I said, I’m not the kinda guy to let good opportunities slip away.”

“Good opportunities for what, exac—”

“Looks like I’ve got a customer,” he said, cutting me off mid-sentence. I could hear the distinctive sound of another voice, the rumbling of a large engine, and the slamming of a car door. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Tonight, yeah?” he asked, as if reminding me one last time.

“Yeah,” I nodded, only somewhat aware of the fact that he couldn’t see me over the phone, still too muddled in the concept of us going to dinner together in a mere five hours.

“Right then, duty calls,” and I could hear it calling, loud and incoherent over the dull roar of an engine, “Bye, love.” He hung up, the dial tone unbearable compared to the lull of his voice. I took the phone from my ear and stared at the screen for a long time after it went dark, my own reflection blinking back up at me, owlish and strange with a large grin stitched to its cheeks.