She nodded slowly. “That sounds serious.”
“It’s manageable,” he said. “It’s not an emergency today, but it shouldn’t wait much longer. The belt itself isn’t expensive. The labor is about an hour.”
“I see.” She paused. “And how much would that be, altogether?”
He quoted her a fair price. She thanked him and said she’d like to go ahead. He began gathering what he needed and she settled into a chair near the waiting area, an old plastic chair that he had noticed wobbled slightly on its left leg. He made a mental note to fix that.
Over the next half hour, they talked the way people sometimes do when one of them is working and the other is watching. Not constantly, but in the natural pauses between tasks. She asked whether he had worked there long. He said four years. She asked whether he enjoyed it. He thought about it genuinely before answering, which she seemed to notice.
“I like the work itself,” he said. “There’s something satisfying about diagnosing something, fixing it, making it right. It feels useful.”
“It is useful,” she agreed simply.
She asked about his family with the frank curiosity of someone who considered the question perfectly natural, and he found, a little to his surprise, that he didn’t mind answering. He told her about his mother, about the illness that had come on gradually and then more insistently, about the medication that kept things stable but needed to be kept up without gaps. He said it without complaint, just as a set of facts, the same way he might describe the condition of an engine.
“You take care of her alone?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She has a sister across town, but she’s got her own family to manage. I don’t mind. She took care of me for twenty years by herself. It’s not a burden.”
