I nodded.
“She said she should have protected us.”
Then he looked at me.
“I told her it was okay because you did.”
I couldn’t answer for a moment.
Then he asked something else.
“When Mom and Brent refused to pay you and were saying all those mean things, you just said ‘okay.’ Weren’t you mad?”
“I was so angry I could feel it in my boots.”
“Then why did you say okay?”
I thought about it.
“Because by then, I had already decided what mattered.”
The money didn’t matter.
The insults didn’t matter.
The Mercedes didn’t matter.
Rick and Noah mattered.
“I knew that by the next morning, you two were going to be safer.”
Rick considered that carefully.
“So ‘okay’ was like a plan.”
I smiled.
“Yeah.”
“Okay was like a plan.”
Last Saturday, Noah came with me to the garage.
He’s six now.
He carried around a wrench and pretended to check tire pressure.
Around noon, a young woman pulled into the lot in an old Honda Civic with smoke coming from under the hood.
She had a baby in the back seat.
She looked close to tears.
“I don’t have much money. I just need the car to get to work Monday.”
Noah walked over holding his wrench.
“My dad can fix anything.”
Then he added proudly,
“And sometimes he doesn’t make people pay much if they don’t have money. He just says okay and fixes it.”
The woman laughed.
She looked at me.
“Is that true?”
I looked at Noah.
Tiny pale scar on his lip.
Chompy sticking out of his overalls pocket.
“Pretty much. Pull into bay two.”
It was only a cracked radiator hose.
Twenty minutes.
About forty dollars in parts.
I charged her ten.
Before leaving, she looked up at the garage sign.
“Who painted that?”
“Me and my brother,” Noah said proudly. “I did the C. I went outside the lines.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I know.”
After she drove away, Noah looked up at me.
“Why did you only charge her ten dollars?”
“Because she needed the money more than I did.”
