"There is a difference between knowing now and knowing before you make the decision," Mina said, but her tone held no triumph. She returned the page. "Give June my number. I will answer her questions myself."
At the rear of the shop a delivery driver was arguing with a parts clerk about a package marked URGENT. The box had arrived torn, its barcode scraped away. Mina watched it go past and stood abruptly.
"Wait," she called. "Don't sign for that."
The driver protested that he had two dozen stops left. Mina photographed the damaged label and slit the tape. Inside were replacement cables for the accessible conversions, packed in foam. There was no installation sheet and no traceable batch number.
"This is exactly what I told them not to send," Mina said.
She made Noah put the box on a separate shelf. Tessa watched them mark it QUARANTINE. It was a word she had heard in hospitals, but never associated with a vehicle that might carry her mother.
- • •
The following afternoon, Silas agreed to meet Tessa at the transport office, with a condition: no prices, no brochures, and no promises that somebody else would have to keep. He sat at an old conference table with his notebook open and his reading glasses balanced near the bridge of his nose. June remained beside him, her pen ready. A driver named Marisol Vega leaned against the doorframe in a fleece jacket stained with coffee.
Tessa brought a service bulletin, a printed specification sheet, and a mechanical diagram. She had spent the morning reading every paragraph she could understand and making notes beside the ones she could not. Mina had checked the stack and corrected three misunderstandings.
"First," Tessa said, "I'm sorry. I was rude to you. I treated the way you looked as if it told me what you could buy, and I didn't listen to what you asked."
Silas folded his glasses. "Thank you for saying it plainly."
"I won't ask you to accept it."
"Good. That leaves us free to discuss the vehicle."
He drew the diagram toward him. For the next twenty minutes he and Marisol asked about load limits, cable routing, weather sealing, and what a driver should do if the electrical system failed while a passenger was using the lift. Tessa answered the questions she knew. When she did not know, she said so. Twice she called Mina on speakerphone. By the end of the discussion, her own notebook was full.
"What happens after the warranty?" Marisol asked.
"The mechanical release still works," Tessa said, "but the conversion manufacturer requires inspection every twelve months."
"Is there a certified shop within sixty miles?"
"Haven is certified for the base vehicle. I'm checking the conversion certification."
Marisol lifted an eyebrow. "So the brochure's word 'serviceable' may be doing more work than it ought to."
"Yes," Tessa admitted.
Silas nodded toward her. "That's the best answer you've given so far."
When the meeting ended, June walked Tessa out past a bulletin board covered with thank-you notes and transport schedules. A drawing from an elementary school showed a blue bus carrying a dozen people under a large yellow sun. At the bottom a child had written THANK YOU FOR BRINGING GRANDMA HOME.
"My grandmother started this with one borrowed car," June said. "People think the hard part is raising money. It isn't. The hard part is earning a kind of trust that survives a breakdown on a lonely road."
Tessa looked through the front window at the aging buses in the yard. One was held together with an extraordinary variety of replacement panels. "How many vehicles are you buying?"
"Four accessible vans first. Two more if the expansion funding comes through. The bid is larger than people assume. But the grant also requires open procurement, service guarantees, and documentation. We can't select a dealer because somebody apologizes nicely."
"I understand."
"Do you? Your boss doesn't seem to. He called yesterday and said he could reserve inventory if we paid a deposit before inspecting it."
Tessa felt her face grow warm. "He called you?"
"He wanted us to know his company was eager to help. He also called my grandfather 'the old fellow' and suggested I handle the paperwork."
They stopped beside the door. Tessa could hear Marisol laughing at something Silas had said inside. She understood, finally, why the old man had not appeared wounded when she dismissed him. He had been too busy measuring a business by the way it treated people who seemed unable to reward it.