Beneath the photograph, taped at a slight angle and re-taped so many times its corners were soft, was a strip from a photo booth: Marisol and Tomas at a county fair, her cheek pressed to his, both of them mid-laugh at a joke the camera had interrupted. Beneath that, at eye level when the door was open and he was sitting on the bench to change his boots, Sofia's dinosaurs were accumulating in a small bright herd. He looked at all of it every morning for exactly as long as it took to hang up his jacket, and then he shut the door, and the metal rang, and he went and fixed buses.
That was the arrangement. It had terms. He kept his hands busy and his head down and his daughter fed and his past in a locker, and in exchange the town let him be ordinary, and ordinary was, he had discovered in the hardest school there is, a luxury so complete that men who had never lost it could not see it at all. Tomas knew ordinary was the life, guarded at cost. It was the whole job.
He did the brake inspections in two hours and fifty minutes and Earl's lift without swearing more than twice, which for Earl's lift constituted a personal best, and at noon he sat in the break room with Ben and ate the lunch he had packed at five that morning: rice, chicken, beans, a small container of cut peppers, an apple. He ate it slowly and completely, sitting down, because Ben had made it a rule of the break room that Tomas sat for lunch, on the grounds that a man who ate standing up in a room with chairs was making a statement and the statement was not a good one.
"Your posture," Ben said, apropos of nothing, around a sandwich the size of a paving slab.
"What about my posture."
"You walk like a man carrying something on his back that he doesn't want to drop. Shoulders up by your ears. My chiropractor has a poster about you."
"My shoulders are where God and the county put them."
"Your shoulders are in a defensive crouch, is what they are. You hunch like the ceiling owes you money." Ben considered this and revised. "Although. In fairness. You never drop anything. In nine years I have never seen you drop a tool, a part, a lunch, a child, nothing. Earl drops a socket if you look at him with intention. You catch things before they've decided to fall. It's uncanny and we've discussed it as a department."
"We have not discussed it as a department."
"We have discussed it as a department minus you, which is the standard format for departmental discussion." Ben took an enormous bite. "Sofia weekend. You actually get an evening to yourself tonight. What does the wild bachelor of Alder Falls do with it. And do not say laundry."
"Laundry," Tomas said. "And the gutters on the back of the building, which Rosa says are growing a garden, and I am going to walk home the long way through the park because the short way has the roadworks and the roadworks have a man with a sign who waves it like he's landing aircraft and it makes me tired in a place I can't point to."
"The park way. Very wild. They'll write songs."
"Let them spell my name right and they can write what they like."
The afternoon shift ran long because bus seven came in with a transmission complaint that resolved, after ninety minutes of Tomas lying on cold concrete with his arm up inside the guts of the thing, into a sensor that had simply given up and decided to lie about everything, which he respected as a failure mode and replaced without resentment. He showered at the depot in water that went from cold to scalding with nothing in between, scrubbed his hands with the gritty soap that took off most of the day and none of the history, and changed into jeans and a clean shirt. In the locker room mirror he looked like what the town believed he was: a tired mechanic of thirty-nine with gray coming in at the temples, a nose that bent a quarter inch left of true, and eyes that went somewhere else when he was thinking. He worked on the eyes. He practiced, sometimes, in that mirror, the face of a man with nothing behind it, and most days the face held.
Rosa's house was four streets from the school, a white clapboard place with blue shutters and a porch that had held three generations of Herreras during thunderstorms. She had Sofia for the weekend by arrangement so old it no longer needed confirming, and when Tomas came up the walk at five thirty to drop off the overnight bag and the stuffed rabbit whose ear had been re-sewn so many times it was more thread than rabbit, Sofia was already in her grandmother's kitchen standing on a stool, stirring something with the concentration of a surgeon, wearing an apron that reached her ankles.