Though he was rude enough to take the bottle from her fingers without a word, Marya lingered close by as if she hadn’t yet been dismissed. She watched with intense interest as he drank down the Coke, sitting up awkwardly on the wheeled seat. Lee and his friends could guzzle soft drinks in virtually one long swallow, it was amazing, a phenomenon less of thirst than of piggishness and stamina. . . . A series of small rapid swallows, forehead creased in concentration and eyes half closed in a kind of ecstasy. . . .

Marya watched; said half sullenly that it didn’t look like he was going to leave anything for her. Lee didn’t hear, or pointedly ignored her. He finished the bottle, wiped his mouth with his arm, belched, set the bottle down, and rolled it in the general direction of one of the corners, where bottles were collected for deposit.

The bottle began to roll in a crooked trajectory, so Marya stooped to pick it up.

Lee said, “Okay now, get the hell out, I don’t want any distractions or fooling around.”

Marya said, “. . . I wasn’t fooling around.”

She saw that the jack was pumped up as high as it would go; this was to save Lee from working in the pit, which was filthy—it hadn’t been cleaned out in months. She might have felt a tinge of danger—because of course the jack could slip. (Everard was always warning the children against playing with his tools. Never were they to poke around in the garage when he wasn’t there!—he’d burn their asses if they did. His own forefinger and middle finger were misshapen from an accident he’d had putting chains on a neighbor’s truck stalled out in the snow and once he’d narrowly avoided getting killed when a tractor he was repairing overturned, he’d started the motor got the damn thing going suddenly it bucked forward knocking him down. . . . “What you think afterward is how fast it all happened,” Everard said. “You think if you had it to do over again you wouldn’t make the same mistake and that’s true, but you don’t get to do it over again, right?”)

Marya stood studying the jack. Wondering how it would feel to the touch: how greasy, how nasty. But there was a smell about the garage and the repair pit she liked too. A smell of oil, rubber, old rags. She wouldn’t have minded learning some of the things Everard had taught Lee just for the fun of it. Or just for the hell of it. Why not? She was as smart as Lee, wasn’t she. “How does this thing work?” she asked. But she knew enough not to touch it not even lightly, experimentally, with her thumb.

“Lee?” she said. “How does this thing work?”

He didn’t hear, or he didn’t feel like answering.