I’d worked on cars with Tad for more than a decade, nearly half his life. I was pretty sure that if anything, I looked worse than he did. A smudge of black swooped across his right cheekbone and onto his ear like badly applied war paint. It was also tipped here and there with the same grease that marked the overalls. Summer still held sway-if only just-so those overalls were stained with sweat, too.Įven his hair showed the effects of working in the heat, sticking out at odd angles. Like me, he wore grease-stained overalls. To speed up the repair, Tad was taking the left side and I was working on the right. I liked kids, but tired kids cooped up in my office space were another matter. I wished she had family here to watch them. She had, she told me, family in Missoula who could watch her children, but nobody but her alcoholic ex-husband to watch them in Portland, so she’d brought them with her. The task was made more urgent by the fact that the owner and her three children under five were occupying the office. We needed to get her back on the road so she could make her job interview tomorrow at eight a.m. The owner had been driving from Portland to Missoula, Montana, when her car blew the radiator. It was a rush case on a couple of fronts. To do that, we had to take the whole front clip off. “ARE YOU OKAY, MERCY?” TAD ASKED ME AS HE DISCONNECTED the wiring harness from the headlight of the 2000 Jetta we were working on. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.įor Jean, who has a beautiful heart and kindįor Ginny, who can herd cats and make them like it. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.Īll rights reserved. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Bone crossed by patricia briggs