Isaiah Coleman stood at the window with a glass of water he had forgotten to drink and watched a boy across the street learning to ride a bicycle in the church parking lot, falling with the total commitment of the young, getting up with the same. He was fifty-three years old. On Monday morning he would sign his name on a stack of documents and Coleman Dynamics would own sixty-one percent of Pemberton Industries, and the signature was the end of a sentence that had begun thirty years ago, in a convention hall in Chicago, in front of a booth with blue carpet.
He had planned to think about pension schedules and the Reading plant's second shift. But the mind is a repair shop at closing time: you can sweep it, you can lock the front, and still the things on the bench go on quietly being what they are.
"You're doing the window again," Naomi said from the doorway.
"I'm supervising the bicycle situation."
"The bicycle situation has a father, a mother, and two older sisters in attendance, Isaiah. It does not require a chief executive." She came and stood beside him, not touching, the way she had stood beside him for twenty-six years — close enough that touch was available and never demanded. Naomi Coleman had run a school for nineteen years, and she knew a silence was often just a sentence getting dressed. She waited until his came down the stairs.
"Tomorrow," he said at last, "I keep having the thought that I should go by the shop first. Before the lawyers. It's not even on the way."
The shop was on the way to nothing. Coleman Repair had closed in 2009, the year after Samuel died; the building had been a tire place, then a church, then nothing, its windows soaped. Isaiah owned the lot and refused, the two times developers asked, to say why.
"You know why," Naomi said.
"I know several whys. I'm trying to decide which one is driving."
And he let himself go where the thought had been pulling him since Friday night — backward, down the long service corridor of the years, to a narrow storefront with a bell over the door.
The bell over the door at Coleman Repair was not a bell, exactly. It was a strip of spring steel with two brass jingles bolted to it, and it made a sound with no dignity in it at all — a bright, cheap clatter, like a spoon dropped in an empty pot. Samuel had installed it in 1968 and refused for forty years to replace it, because a man in a back room should be reminded, every single time, which side of the counter his bread was buttered on.
The shop smelled the way Isaiah had believed, until he was grown and had traveled, that all honest places smelled: machine oil and hot dust, the scorched-sweet breath of a soldering iron, rubber belts, and — laid over all of it like a tablecloth over a workbench — his mother's coffee. Ruth Coleman kept the shop's books at a desk wedged between the parts bins and the wall, with a percolator on a hot plate beside the ledger; the coffee was so strong and so constant that the regulars timed their visits by it. She kept other people's children at that desk while their mothers got their hair done or their cars fixed or their lives, briefly, back — there was always a coloring book in the second drawer and a jar of peppermints that never, in Isaiah's memory, ran empty, though no one ever saw her fill it.
Samuel could fix anything that had ever been plugged in, wound up, or belted down in the state of Georgia — including the great groaning icebox at the church that three other men had pronounced dead and that he had raised, Lazarus-like, with a relay and a scolding. People brought him machines the way they brought Ruth their troubles: in the faith that the Colemans did not know how to look at a broken thing and see only the break.
Isaiah was twelve the winter of the radio.
It came in on a Saturday, carried by Mr. Odom from two streets over, a tabletop Philco in a wooden case the color of strong tea, and it came in dead — not silent-dead, which was simple, but worse: it hummed and crackled and now and then, like a man clearing his throat to speak and thinking better of it, let a torn scrap of music through before drowning it again. Mr. Odom set it on the counter with the care of a pallbearer. His wife had died in November. The radio had been hers; it had sat on her kitchen sill for twenty years, and he had not, he told Samuel, been able to eat breakfast in that kitchen since it quit, the quiet being a size he hadn't known a room could be.
Samuel did not say a word about the wife, which was his way of saying everything about her. He plugged the radio in, listened, nodded once, and said, "We'll see what it's trying to tell us, Mr. Odom." Then he looked at Isaiah, who had been sweeping the same square of floor for six minutes in order to stay in the room, and said, "Boy. Apron. You're assisting."