Chapter 3: Costa Auto

The shop smelled the way it always smelled: motor oil, hot metal, and the green bite of cutting fluid. Costa Auto sat on the corner of Mill and Second in Bramwell, a cinder-block building with three bays and a hand-painted sign that Marco Costa had never gotten around to replacing even though the C in Costa had faded to a ghost of itself. The lot was gravel, and the gravel had two ruts worn into it from thirty years of trucks pulling in and out, and there was a tire out front that Marco used as a planter and had never planted anything in, and a coffee can by the door for the honor-system coffee that had never once, in the history of the shop, been refilled by anyone other than Marco himself. Dani pulled the Civic into the gravel lot at half past eleven and killed the engine and sat there listening to it tick.

Her phone buzzed. Jess.

*did you find out who he was*

*no*

*are you going to*

*no*

*you're boring*

Dani smiled and put the phone face-down on her thigh. She grabbed her Big Gulp and the chips, which were all she'd eaten for dinner, and she got out and walked around the side of the building to the back bay.

The back bay was hers.

Marco rented the two front bays out to paying customers, oil changes and brake jobs and the steady bread-and-butter work that kept the lights on. The third bay, the one in the back with the door that stuck and the light that flickered, he'd given to Dani when she was fourteen. It had been her Christmas present. Not the bay itself, which was technically still his, but the right to it, the use of it, the key to the padlock.

She'd built a car in there. Was building one. Is.

The Nissan 240SX sat under a drop cloth in the back corner, and Dani pulled the cloth off the way she always did, one handed, from the front, letting it slide down over the hood and pool on the floor. The car was a 1995 S14, faded red, the paint oxidized to chalk on the roof, the body straight but old. She'd bought it for nine hundred dollars from a kid in Holloway who'd blown the head gasket and didn't want to deal with it. That had been a year ago. She'd been saving since she was sixteen.

She'd found the ad on a Tuesday night, scrolling through it the way she scrolled through every listing in a hundred-mile radius, half hoping and half not, and when she'd seen the photo, the faded red paint, the straight body panels, the interior stripped down to a bare shell, she'd known before she'd even called. She'd driven Bessie to Holloway the next morning with nine hundred dollars in an envelope in her glovebox, cash she'd saved dollar by dollar from three summers of babysitting and one winter of shoveling every driveway on her street, and the kid who sold it to her had asked if she knew what she was doing, and she'd said yes, and she hadn't been entirely sure, and she'd been right anyway.

The engine was out. It sat on a stand in the corner, stripped to the block, the head off, the pistons visible. She'd been porting and polishing the head by hand for two weeks, and her thumbs ached from the die grinder. On the workbench sat a box of parts she'd ordered online and paid for in installments: a turbo, a manifold, injectors, a standalone ECU. She'd told her dad they were for a customer's car. Marco had nodded and not asked, the way he'd stopped asking questions about the back bay a long time ago.

Dani set her Big Gulp on the bench and pulled a stool over and sat down and picked up the die grinder and went back to work on the intake port, the aluminum dust falling like silver snow onto her jeans.

She loved this. What she loved about way the shop sounded at night, the hum of the compressor in the corner, the tick of metal cooling, the way the fluorescent light turned everything the same flat white. The thing she loved about feel of a port wall under her fingertips, the way she could tell by touch whether she'd gotten it smooth enough. She loved that a car was a puzzle you could hold in your hands, every piece answering to every other piece, nothing hidden, nothing that couldn't be fixed with enough time and the right tool.

Her grandfather had taught her that.

Sal Costa had raced super modifieds on the dirt tracks of the eastern half of the state for thirty years, and he'd won more than he'd lost, and the walls of the small office at the front of the shop were covered in his photographs, black and white and color, a young man in a firesuit with a trophy in his hands and dirt on his face. Sal had taught Dani to hold a wrench before she could hold a pen, had put her on his lap in the cockpit of a super mod when she was four and let her steer in the pits while he worked the throttle.

Then, when she was nine, the crash. Turn three at Holloway Speedway, a lapped car, a broken axle, a flip that had broken Sal's back in three places. The wheelchair had come six weeks later. Sal never raced again. He never even came to the shop. He sat in his house on Maple Street and watched racing on television with the volume low and he didn't talk about it, and Marco, who had grown up in the pits, who had crewed for his father, who had built his first engine at fifteen, never raced either. He opened Costa Auto and he fixed other people's cars and he never went fast, and Dani understood, without anyone ever saying it, that the speed had been the thing that had broken them, and so the speed was the thing they'd given up.

Holloway Speedway sat fifteen miles east of Bramwell, a half-mile dirt oval carved into a farmer's field in the fifties, the kind of track that ran on Friday nights and smelled like dust and popcorn and the methanol they burned in the sprint cars. The grandstands held two thousand people on a good night, wooden bleachers that creaked under the weight of them, and turn three was the high-banked corner on the far side of the track, the one the drivers called the graveyard because it was where the lapped traffic stacked up and the leaders came through too fast and the wrecks happened. Sal had been leading the night he crashed, leading by half a lap, and a lapped car had cut down on him in turn three, a broken axle sending the other car sideways into his line, and Sal's super mod had climbed the right rear tire of the lapped car and launched into the air, and the whole grandstand had heard the silence before the sound, the half-second where the car was in the air and nobody was breathing, and then the crash, and then the screaming of the crowd.

Dani had been nine years old, standing on the bleachers beside her grandmother Rosa, and she'd heard the silence, and she'd understood it, because even a nine-year-old understands when something has gone wrong in a way that can't be fixed, and she'd grabbed her grandmother's hand, and Rosa had squeezed it hard enough to hurt, and they'd stood there together in the crowd and waited, and the ambulance had come, and the track had gone quiet, and Sal had survived, and the speed had been the thing that had broken him, and Dani had loved it anyway, the way you love the thing that hurts you, because the speed was in her blood the way the oil was in her father's hands, and she couldn't give it up either, so she'd done the thing the Costa men had never done, which was keep it a secret instead of giving it up, and it had worked, for years, it had worked.

Dani had not given it up.

She'd just stopped telling them.

She finished the port, blew the dust out with compressed air, and set the grinder down. She checked her phone. Twelve forty. She had to be at the range by seven in the morning.

The range was the other thing. The quiet thing. She'd started archery at thirteen, a summer program at the community center in Holloway, and she'd turned out to be good at it, the kind of good that comes from the same stillness that made her good at porting a cylinder head. She shot three mornings a week at the outdoor range off Route 9, a recurve bow, twenty-eight meters, and she could group five arrows in a circle the size of a quarter on a still day. The discipline had bled into everything else. Her driving. Her patience. The way she could hold her breath and her body and wait for the exact right moment, and then move, and then not move again until the next exact right moment.

The community center program had been free, run by a volunteer named Warren who'd shot competitively in college and had bad knees and a patience that felt bottomless, and Warren had put a recurve bow in Dani's hands the first day and told her the bow was an extension of her arm and her arm was an extension of her breath and her breath was an extension of her intention, and Dani had been thirteen and had no idea what any of that meant, and she'd understood it completely, and she'd shot three mornings a week for the next seven years, and Warren had retired to Florida two summers ago, and she still shot the same warmup routine he'd taught her, forty arrows, same order, same targets, every single time.

She went inside through the back door, leaving her shoes at the mat. Marco was asleep in the recliner in front of the television with a racing magazine open on his chest. The television was on, a replay of a late-model race, the volume low. Dani stood in the doorway and watched him for a moment, the gray in his beard, the grease still under his fingernails from the day, the magazine rising and falling with his breathing.

She turned the television off. She pulled a blanket over his legs. Her destination was bed.

In the dark she lay on her back with her hand on her sternum and she thought about the visor, the black mirror of it, the eyes underneath, the held breath under her palm. Her mind went to his voice saying *take it back* and the way it had dropped when he said *now you can see me*.

She pressed her fingers to her lips. The cool of the visor was gone. There was only her own warmth now.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She rolled over and looked. A text from an unknown number.

*take it back*

Dani stared at the screen. Her heart did something stupid in her chest. Dani sat up. She typed, *who is this*.

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

*the guy you broke up with at the red light. the one whose helmet you kissed at the 7-eleven. the one you owe a real one. remember?*

She should block the number. She should delete it. She should put the phone down and go to sleep and forget the whole stupid night.

She typed: *how did you get my number*.

*i have skills*

*that's creepy*

*that's accurate. go to sleep, heartbreaker. you have the range at seven.*

Her stomach dropped. She read the text again. *You have the range at seven.* How did he know that.

*how do you know my schedule*, she typed.

The three dots appeared. Held. Then:

*goodnight.*

And nothing else. Dani sat in the dark holding her phone like it might bite her, and she did not sleep for a long time.