“Oh, we discussed those plenty often too.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure.”

Sam had formed something between a little-sister thing and a crush on roommate, so she noticed when Pearl stopped coming home after class. “Where’s Pearl?” she asked after several no-Pearl days, all no big deal except for the way her voice rose like a cracked bell, not quite in tune.

“She’s avoiding my mother.”

Leaning into the engine next to me, Sam pulled up so fast she almost fell over. “Why?” she said, grabbing hold of the front end briefly to right herself, ignoring the way I lunged for her arm. She never asked for help. If she needed something, she demanded it. I can’t reach. Lower the lift. After she was in the truck and screwing with the radio last week, her dad told me she’d been born with a spinal disorder, adding that she’d been scrapping her way toward self-reliance since birth. Big surprise. Not.

“What’d your mom say to her? Did you let your mom kick her out?” she asked, her fist balled like she was prepared to sock me if I’d had anything to do with Pearl’s disappearance. “I thought this was your place. Did you kick her out?”

“Settle down. Jesus. Nobody kicked anybody out. It’s… complicated.”

She frowned at the worn-out hose in her hand, halfway detached and briefly forgotten. “I’m pretty smart, y’know. I can follow complicated.”

I sighed. “Fine. But you can’t talk to Pearl about it. At all. Understand?”

She felt for her chair’s handles and lowered herself into it. “Why not?”

I stared at her.

“Okay, okay,” she huffed. “I never see her now anyway.”

I finished detaching the coolant hose while I spoke. “My dad died in May. He and my mom—who took off when I was seven—never divorced, which was news to me. So everything is hers—including the garage. She thought I was just going to run the place for her until she sells it or whatever she plans to do with it. Fuck that—but I promised Pearl a place to live until mid-August, so I worked a deal with my mom. I’ll stay and keep running the garage until Pearl moves back to Austin. Then I’m gone.”

“She’s moving away? And… you’re leaving town?”

“I can’t stay and watch my mother pull to pieces everything I’ve built. I have to get the hell out of here, at least for a while.”

“So I won’t have a job anymore either, come fall.” Her crushed tone was hell.

I nodded. “Sorry about that, Sam.”

She stared into her lap. “Sorry about your dad.”

“You don’t need to be sorry about him. He was nothing like your dad. He was just something I survived.”

She scratched her thigh with a grease-lined fingernail, thinking. “What do you think will happen to Wynn’s Garage? Obviously your mom isn’t gonna run it. She never even comes out here.”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” I wished like hell that was true.

“This sucks,” she said.

She had no idea. I had less than six weeks left with Pearl.

Pearl

A few months ago, I read an article that linked anxiety to inattention to accident-proneness. Fascinating, I mused, and didn’t think about it again—until now.

During lab this morning, I dumped a petri dish full of phytoplankton and the water in which they were swimming on my shirt. Thankful no one noticed, I refilled the dish and conducted the series of measurements as expected, but this was three for three. First the beaker. Then last week I’d tripped over a taped-down cord in the lab and sloshed scalding hot coffee over my hand, which might have gone unnoticed had I not spit out a Boyce Wynn-worthy string of curses right after. (“Nice,” one of the visiting undergrads said, sending me a flirtatious grin, because being chatted up is what a girl wants when her hand is on fire.)

I might have been inured to the sulfurous odor emanating from my shirt, but I knew Minnie wouldn’t welcome me smelling like a science experiment during my four-hour shift at the inn, and the liquid had left a conspicuous blotch of discoloration as well, so I went home after class to change, cussing my recent spate of carelessness while acknowledging the thrill that zipped through me at the excuse to see Boyce during the day. I missed my weekday chats with Sam too.

Since Ruthanne kept her hail-battered Ford coupe parked on the gravel next to Boyce’s car, I’d begun parking my GTI on the street on the opposite side of the trailer. Inside, she sat on the sofa, alternating her attention between her phone and daytime television. We ignored each other, per usual. I dumped my backpack on the kitchen table and grabbed two Pepsis from the fridge.

Neither Boyce nor Sam had seen me arrive when I wasn’t expected home, nor did they see me back away from the mouth of the garage, processing the conversation I’d overheard.

I put the sodas back into the fridge as my thoughts spun, stretching and twisting like they’d been threaded through a taffy machine. Boyce had no hopes or remaining aspirations concerning the garage or his relationship with his mother. He had continued working for her for one reason: the promise he’d made to me.

All I could do to help him was free him to leave.

Shouldering my backpack, I left the trailer, snuck to my car and drove to Thomas’s office as if on autopilot. Once inside I recalled that Tuesday afternoons were reserved for surgery consults and emergency postsurgical checkups. There were five people in his small waiting room—the equivalent of rush hour. I nearly burst into tears.

His nurse, Talisha, opened the door to call a patient back, glancing up from the chart in her hand to spot me standing like a lost puppy in the middle of the room. “Well, hello, Pearl! What are you—” She halted mid-sentence and reached to take my arm. “Come on back, honey. Mr. Gardner, you just head on down to room three. We’ll be right with you.”

One minute later, I’d been escorted into Thomas’s inner office, handed a cup of water, and left to sit on the sofa he used for an occasional afternoon nap. An ornate clock sat atop the doorstop edition of Gray’s Anatomy in his bookcase and ticked the seconds away—ninety or so of them by the time he slipped through the door and shut it behind him.

“What’s happened?” he demanded, walking to sit beside me. He took my hand and focused his clear blue gaze on me.

“I need to know if there’s a chance… that I could move home.” My lip wobbled and I swallowed, bracing myself. “Without quitting my program—”