“You did?”

“School called. So, we’ve got a meeting next week?”

“It’s so stupid, Dad.” All the frustration I’ve been working off rushes back like a hurricane. “I wouldn’t even have fallen if everyone had left me alone!”

“Okay.” Dad’s not mad. Not at me, anyway. “Come on. Got a rear differential needs some TLC. You can fill me in.”

I follow him to the garage, he uses the air compressor to blow the dirt and grass from my wheels and frame, and I tell him the whole saga while we work on a hearse from the funeral home. I end by telling him about the “game-plan meeting” Dr. Grayling called.

Dad whistles. “That’s a sticky one.”

“You’re telling me.” I pull out a broken screw and throw it at the workbench. It bounces off and barely misses Dad, who’s wheeling out from under the hearse on his back. He sets the lift way down low when I work with him, so he ends up doing a lot of work on the wheeled creeper that looks like a big flat skateboard.

“Watch it, killer!” he teases, and hands me back the screw.

“Sorry.” I sigh, then toss the screw—gently—onto the workbench. “It’s ridiculous.”

“I know, Emms.” Dad sits up on the creeper so we’re eye to eye. “I wish I’d known your armrest was broken. Why didn’t you tell me?”

How can I say I didn’t tell him because he’s been so busy and tired lately? Used to be I wouldn’t have had to say anything, because Dad was always on top of keeping my wheels in perfect condition, no matter what I’d been up to.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t that bad.” I show him, and he immediately pulls the armrest off, cuts away all the tape, and takes it to the vise.

“How’s that?” he asks after he finishes and slides it back into place.

It’s perfect, like everything Dad fixes. “It’ll last until I have my new wheels,” I tell him. “Then you’ll have no hope of keeping me off that ramp.”

Dad’s super proud I’m saving for the new chair. He was twelve, too, when he started cutting grass and pitching hay to save up for a truck. On his sixteenth birthday, he paid cash for a little candy-red Nissan pickup. He still drives it, and it looks and runs like new.

Dad doesn’t grin back. “The new wheels are going to be swell,” he says slowly. “And you know I support you working for them.”

“But?”

“But let’s focus on getting through this meeting first,” Dad says. “You haven’t had a fall at school in years—you sure you weren’t being a bit reckless?”

“No!” I burst out. Like he should talk—Mr. Former Speed Demon himself. I explain—again—how it all went down.

“Okay,” he says when I finish talking. “Okay. We’ll deal with it.”

Mom always handled the school meetings. Dad was always pit crew—and fantastic at it—but more than happy to let Mom deal with appointments and meetings and anyplace where talking was key.