she brought the cream that was all the encouragement Ernie needed. He began to talk, and he didn’t stop. When he was partway through his eighth birthday party celebrated in the Great Depression, the dog pressed his nose right up her skirt and moaned plaintively. She looked at her watch, excused herself and fled into the back.
“Where’s Mr. Blake?”
Clive lifted his head and looked at her, astonished. “Mr. Blake? Oh, you mean Garner?”
She nodded.
“Through there. Problem?”
Yes, there was a problem. She was done. She could not be a taxi driver, switchboard operator, brake biller, coffee-shop waitress, professional listener. She was not going to have rude dogs sniffing her skirt and moaning. It was too much to expect of one person.
Besides, things had been left undone for too long in this office. The work was mountainous. There wasn’t enough instruction. How could she do any work with that man babbling away out there? The phone ringing? The dog…well, never mind the dog.
To add to that, there was no air-conditioning, and she was sweating through her lovely silk shell.
She burst into the bay where Garner was bent over her damaged Cadillac.
It looked different than the other bays. Spotlessly clean, for one.
He came out from under the hood, regarded her mildly, his gaze lingering just a little too long on where the sweat pooled between her breasts and made her silk top stick to her. Then he looked at his watch. He had the audacity to smile.
“Yes?” he said hopefully.
It was the hopefulness that made her forget the mountains of work, the interruptions, the extra duties, the dog and the sweat.
“There is a man out there I don’t quite know what to do with,” she said.
Disappointment crossed his features. “Oh, 10:31. Ernie, right?”
“And Bert!”
“I keep some cookies just under the counter. Give one to Bert.”
That’s why the stupid dog had been accosting her. He wanted his cookie.
He ducked back under the hood, dismissing her. “Oh, and Ernie likes cream in his coffee. It’s in the fridge.”
“Are you running a coffee shop or a garage?” she asked, aware of the snip in her voice.
“Some days I guess it’s a little of both,” he said.
“He wants my undivided attention,” she said and heard the frustrated wail in her voice. “I need to figure out a bill for Clive and order a part for Pete, and the phone doesn’t stop ringing. I don’t have time to listen to him!”
“He’s lonely.” Garner came back out from under the hood, wiped his hands on a towel, regarded her cynically, his eyes branding her as superficial.
“Can’t he go be lonely somewhere else?” Jessie said, and was appalled at how callous she sounded. “I’m not much of a multitasker,” she added defensively.
His lips twitched suspiciously and even though Garner’s expression didn’t change, she could hear the smug smile in his voice. “Then, lady, you took a wrong turn at Main Street. This isn’t the place for you.”
“I’ve made it two hours,” she said.
“Not quite.” He ducked back under the hood.
“I think we can call it two hours. We’re only ten minutes short of it.”
“Nope. I have to consider what’s at stake. Are you leaving the minute those two hours are up?”
She contemplated that. Certainly when she’d marched in here that had been her intention. No one could blame her, not even her father. Now she wasn’t so sure she would give the insensitive, self-centered boorish Neanderthal the satisfaction.
“I’m not leaving,” she shocked herself by saying. “I just need to know the official office policy on Ernie.”
“Okay. Official—Give the dog a cookie. Give Ernie some cream for his coffee. Listen to a story or two, if that’s not too big a chore for a princess.”
She felt the insult of it. Had he been under the hood of this car conjuring up names for her in the same fashion she’d been doing to him? But that would mean he’d been thinking about her, and men like him simply didn’t think about girls like her.
Did they?
“That hardly seems professional,” she said after a moment.
He came back up, looked at her long and steady. He did not, she decided, look anything like a Neanderthal, those features so cleanly cut. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t one in his every attitude. Princess, indeed.
“You have to figure out what’s important and what isn’t,” he said quietly.
It felt, ridiculously, like the Neanderthal was giving her instructions for her life. What was important in her life? And what wasn’t? And why was it that in six years of obtaining a higher education, she had never asked herself that? Two hours on the front line, and it felt like everything, including her hard-won self-confidence, was disintegrating.
“Have you ever heard this Vietnamese proverb?” Garner asked, and his eyes were locked on hers, deep, dark and challenging. “When you eat fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.”
She stared at him, nonplussed. That was the last thing she had expected to come out of his mouth. Poetry, for God’s sake. Philosophy. Foreign philosophy at that!
He was supposed to be hiding a Neanderthal under that glorious exterior. What if he wasn’t?
She felt, and hid, a little ripple of shock. Garner Blake was not what she thought a typical mechanic was. He was not what she needed him to be if she was going to tame this horrible guilt-inducing awareness of him.
“I may not have a master’s degree,” Garner said, “or a trillion-dollar trust fund, but I know that man, who has lived through a depression and served in a war. He’s the one who planted the tree you and I are enjoying the fruit from today.”
Her mouth fell open.
“In a business like this,” he said, “caring about people has to be part of it. They can go get their cars fixed way cheaper in a bigger place. And you can’t pretend you care about them, either. It has to be the real deal.”
She hated that. That this big brooding ignoramus in front of her seemed to think he knew more about what was important than she did. And that he was so obviously the real deal.
What did that make her?
“You know what’s important?” she snapped at him.
He raised a dark eyebrow.
“I made it two hours!”
He nodded, glanced again at his watch. “Jumping the gun again. According to my watch you have six minutes left.”
She marched out of there. Ernie was still nursing his coffee, the dog gave her a betrayed look, which she fixed by finding the jar of enormous dog cookies behind the counter.
Six minutes left. She took the stool beside Ernie. “Okay,” she said. “You were talking about the Depression. Your birthday, I believe.”
He stared at her, stunned. A light went on in his faded eyes, and his hand covered hers. “Thank you for listening to me.”
She felt ashamed of her own impatience. He was probably the same age as her father. How was it her father seemed so much younger and more vital? So driven and purposeful?
The door to the back bays opened and the two mechanics, Clive and Peter, came out. Garner followed a few minutes later.
She didn’t