The most significant repair of that season was not on Wexler Street at all. Claire's car — the sedan, the one with Junie's booster seat and a trunkful of library books — developed a knock in the front end that she had been outwaiting for a month on a single mother's budget, and she mentioned it at a Friday supper exactly once, in passing, in the tone of a woman remarking on weather in another state. On Saturday morning she came out of her house to find her car up on jack stands in Everett's driveway and her car's entire front suspension disassembled in organizational rows on a tarp, like a field hospital, with Everett underneath the operation on a creeper and his cane planted beside him like a flag.
"Knox," she said, in the tone of a woman addressing a force of nature, "I said it was knocking."
"It was knocking because your strut mount's been dead since spring and your tie rod was composing its memoirs," said the creeper. "You haul my bear cousin around in this. It gets fixed. Hand me the light, woman, and stop hovering where I can't see your face."
She handed him the light. She stayed the whole morning, holding bolts, learning the names of things, getting grease on her good jeans and not minding it at all, while Junie ran a lemonade-and-commentary stand for the neighborhood's benefit at the end of the drive. It was, Claire thought, sitting on an overturned bucket with a socket wrench in her hand, the most romantic morning of her adult life, and she laughed out loud at herself for thinking it, and Everett under the car said, "What's funny," and she said, "Nothing. Everything. Hand up the fourteen," and the fourteen was passed, hand to hand, like everything else that summer.
Word travels through a neighborhood the way water travels through soil: invisibly, and then all at once the garden is different. By the third week of Everett's convalescence, Wexler Street had quietly revised its twelve-year policy toward the house with the motorcycle in the drive, and the revision took the form of broken things.
It began with Mrs. Abernathy's screen door, which had hung crooked since the previous administration and which he fixed on a Tuesday with a screwdriver and a shim and a refusal of lemonade so total it became its own invitation to bring lemonade on Thursday instead. Then a lawnmower at number nine. Then a porch rail, a bicycle with a wobble, a sewing machine treadle older than anyone present. The street had remembered, all at once and collectively, something it had known in the years before and politely forgotten on his behalf: that Everett Knox was the man who fixed things, that his garage had once been the court of last resort for every dead engine and orphan appliance in the county, and that the twelve years of silence had not been a preference but an injury.
He took the work the way he'd taken the cribbage — as ballast against the quiet — and then, somewhere in the second week, he noticed the work had stopped being ballast and become something he would have to call, if he was honest, which Priya's whiteboard was training him to be, a good time. His hands remembered their trade without asking his grief's permission. There is a specific peace available only to men who fix things: the world presents a problem with edges, the problem admits a solution, the solution holds. Grief has no edges. A carburetor has nothing but.
Claire instituted soup on Fridays, which became, by a process no one voted on, supper on Fridays, with Junie presiding over the table like a small chaplain. Del came. Mrs. Abernathy began sending pies with the regularity of a utility. And Everett — who had eaten alone standing at his kitchen counter for twelve years, on the theory that sitting down at a table set for one was more honesty than a man required — Everett found himself asking Claire, in the hardware store, in an aisle full of hinges, whether she thought the dining room table could still seat six if he got the leaf out of the attic.
"It's your table, Knox," she said, studying a hinge as if it had spoken out of turn.
"I know whose table it is," he said. "I'm asking about the leaf. Haven't seen it in—" He stopped. He stood in the aisle with the hinge in his hand and finished the sentence honestly, because the whiteboard had him trained now: "—since Ruth put it away. The last Christmas. She said we'd need it when the family got bigger." He cleared his throat. "Anyway. Engineering question."
Claire took the hinge out of his hand and put it in the basket, and bought two, and on Friday Del and one of the boys got the leaf down from the attic with considerable ceremony and argument, and the table seated six, and then eight with the card table's help, and the dining room of the museum rang with the kind of noise it had been built for. Junie, seated at the head by acclamation on a stack of phone books, called the assembly to order by banging a spoon.
"Grace," she announced, "is that God watches bears eat too. So nobody start till I say."
"Amen," said the table, and meant more of it than any of them could have explained.