“I think I’ve had enough driving for today, but thanks. And if we run into any more of those things, maybe it’s better if you’re behind the wheel.”

Bruce nodded solemnly as he put the car back into drive, but held his foot on the brake. The engine thrummed. “On to the mall. Maybe they’ve got some good sales.”

Bruce took his foot off the brake, tromped down on the accelerator, and the massive car plowed forward. Before long he had it up to seventy.

“Feels like we’re floating on the ocean,” Katie said.

“They don’t call them land yachts for nothing,” Bruce said.

“You ever feel even a little bit guilty about, you know, stealing this car?”

Bruce glanced over. “Nope. Well, not anymore. Guilty those first few years, scared I might get caught. But I’ve moved on.” They drove along in silence for another minute before he said, “So tell me about your dad.”

Katie sighed. “You two would have hit it off. He was a no-bullshit kind of guy, like you. The real deal.” She swallowed. “I miss him every minute of every day.”

“I bet.”

“When he was a lot younger, he was kind of a biker guy. Not in Hell’s Angels or anything, but a rough crowd just the same. And my mom, she ran with him. They grew out of that scene before me and Archie came along, but the motorcycle thing, that was in his blood. He loved fixing them, working on them. He could figure out how anything worked, from a Harley to a lawn mower. Like, if our toaster broke, Mom would say we had to get a new one, but Dad would say, hold on, I bet it’s just a loose wire or something. Something he said to me once, I’ve been thinking about lately.”

“What was that?”

“I was hanging out with him in his shop while he was trying to get some guy’s Kawasaki going again, and he’s got oil on his hands, and there’s this little streak of grease on his cheek, right here.” She pointed to herself. “And it made him look so, I don’t know, cool. Anyway, he stops and he says something like, and I don’t remember it exactly, but he says machines are wonderful things, that they make our lives better and easier, but we can’t ever forget how to do things for ourselves. That if, one day, all the machines disappeared, we’d have to know how to fend for ourselves. You know that he never used a calculator?”

“Seriously?”

“He could pretty much do math in his head, but when it was something tricky, he’d use a pencil and paper. He’d multiply things that way, or do long division. He said calculators had made us all mentally lazy, that we were losing the ability to think.”