Lucian Drake

Ray fixed things on a card table in his garage and for eleven years he never took a dollar for it.

Toasters, mostly. Lamps. A sewing machine that belonged to a woman who cried when it started again. He had a coffee can of fuses and a roll of solder older than his marriage, and people came up the driveway on Saturdays because Ray was the man who could, and being that was worth more to him than the money would have been.

Then the rent went up forty dollars a month and his back went out for two weeks and the roof on the garage started letting in water at the north corner. He sat on the step one evening with a Sharpie and a piece of cardboard from a case of peaches, and he wrote:

REPAIRS $10. NO POWER TOOLS.

He propped it against the vise and went inside for coffee. When he came back out the sign had already done its work. Mrs. Kwan was in the driveway with her kettle.

She had brought him that kettle in the spring of 2014. He had put in a new cord and refused the ten she offered and she had come back the next day with a tray of something with shrimp in it. He remembered the tray. He had not thought about the ten dollars in years.

Now she read the sign twice, top to bottom, like it was a letter from the county.

“Ten dollars,” she said.

“Yes ma'am.”

She opened her purse on the card table. Coins first, then a folded five, then a dollar bill that had been ironed flat. She counted it. He stood there with his coffee and watched her count it, and the awning ticked in the wind, and something in him wanted to say never mind, take it home, but the roof was leaking and his back still ached and he had decided.

She had nine dollars and forty cents. She put it in his hand and closed her fingers around it, which was worse than counting.

“I'll have it Thursday,” she said.

He fixed the kettle that night. He had it ready by Tuesday but he waited until Thursday because he did not want her to think it had been easy.

The kid came on Saturday. Danny, from the corner, ten years old, with a bike chain hanging off his hand like a dead snake. He had a chain tool in his back pocket that he had borrowed from somebody and did not know how to use. Ray could have done it in four minutes.

“Ten dollars,” Ray said.

Danny looked at the sign and then at the table and then at his own shoes.

“I don't have ten dollars.”

“Then I can't do it.”

The kid went away. Ray went back to the toaster he was in the middle of and got the element out and put it back in and did not look up the driveway. Twenty minutes later Danny came back with a mason jar. He set it on the card table without saying anything. Pennies. Some nickels. A dime that was green.

Ray counted it out loud, because he made himself. Three dollars and sixty cents.

He took the jar. “Leave the bike.”

He fixed the chain. He could feel the kid standing in the doorway the whole time, not talking, and he did not offer him a chair and he did not explain about the roof or the rent or his back, because a ten-year-old should not have to hold your reasons. He handed the bike back. The kid rode it down the driveway standing on the pedals.

That night Ray lay in bed and heard the jar. Not the pennies, he had put those in the coffee can with the fuses. The empty jar, on the shelf by the bed, the small tick of it every time the house settled. He got up at eleven and put his shoes on and went across the street to the Halverson porch light that had been out since August, and he fixed it in the dark with a flashlight in his teeth. It took nine minutes. He was careful not to make a sound.

In the morning the sign was still on the card table where he had left it against the vise.

He took his coffee out to the step and looked at it a while. Then he got the Sharpie and wrote one more line underneath, smaller, so it was the last thing you read:

or whatever you have.