When Rebecca invited me to stop by her work during lunch the next day, I don’t know what I was expecting her workshop to look like. Maybe like an actual jewelry store or something with lots of glass windows and black velvet everywhere. Not this.
Nestled back from the road between two citrus groves, it’s a hangar, like the kind where you keep planes and stuff, only smaller. The rippled metal siding is covered all over with huge painted flower motifs; not realistic flowers, but almost prehistoric. I stop to get a closer look, admiring the skillful brushstrokes and envying the artist who got to make them.
I’m still smiling when I walk up the ramp and open the door using a long, flat handle on the left side by the hinge rather than on the far side like typical doors. Pushing it open I realize how this would be a lot more practical to use if I were a wheelchair user.
Inside is loud. There’s the hum of a swamp cooler fan, whirling motors, grinding machines, and clanking tools. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust from the bright sunshine outdoors to the relative darkness of the hangar. I see Rebecca first. She’s got her curls twisted up and held back by a red bandana and glowing golden light illuminates her face as she leans over a table, pouring molten metal into a small mold with tongs.
She spots me then and when I smile, impossibly, her face lights up even more. Relief hits me hard that she’s not feeling too awkward after the park. She only shared a glimpse of that night with me, but I wasn’t sure until now if she was regretting even that little bit.
She gives me the one-second signal with a gloved finger and I look around.
The hangar isn’t as big as it looks from the outside, or maybe it’s all the equipment that makes it look smaller. The workshop is divided into two sections: one side has all the machines and complicated-looking equipment, and the other side is mostly thick wooden tables with tons of small drawers, like apothecary cabinets, and a glass-framed office in the corner. Vices are bolted in between more cabinets and lots of small tools and files hang—not too high—on peg board–covered walls above them. Everything smells like pennies.
“Hi, sorry.” Rebecca wheels to a stop beside me. “I lost track of time. Please tell me I didn’t leave you standing there your whole lunch break.”
I pretend to glance at the watch I’m not wearing. “I probably have a couple minutes left.”
Rebecca laughs. “Want to spend one of those minutes on an abridged tour?”
I don’t really follow all the names of the machines she points out. There are chemical baths and saws, mini drills, and something that looks like a pasta machine on steroids that stretches and flattens metal instead of dough. It’s cool and kind of overwhelming. Not to her though. Her fingers glide lovingly over everything we pass.
“This one is called a ring resizer and has all these cone-shaped holes at the base. I can press a ring into it and it’ll taper, which is great for adding inlay bands. Then—” she moves over to a thin tapered rod with a lever “—I use this guy to stretch the ring back out.” Grabbing the lever, she pulls it and the rod splits into sections. “Cool, huh?”
“Very.” Everything is accessible too, either on a lower-than-standard tabletop or with plenty of clearance on either side. She gets really excited when she leads me to one of the worktables and the piece she’s currently working on.
“So this one started its life as a couple of hex nuts, one gold and the other silver fused together, and I even left some of the angled edges on the outside ’cause I think it suits the client.” She offers it to me and close up I can see wavy lines etched deeply around the band that make me think of the waves in LA and the sunsets here. I turn it around in my fingertips, feeling the little grooves and how perfectly smooth the inside of the ring is. “It’s like two places at once.” I drag my awed gaze away to look at her. “How’d you do that?”
“She practically locked herself in here for a week is how,” says a woman from behind us in an acid-yellow wheelchair. The first thing I notice about her are the tattoos covering her deeply tanned arms; they look exactly like the prehistoric flowers painted outside.
“It was not a week,” Rebecca says to the woman I’m guessing is her boss, Amelia. Then to me, “It wasn’t.”
I’m very aware that I’m being studied by a woman holding what looks like a blow torch. I reach out and set the ring back on the table. “It’s impressive.”
“That’s because I taught her.” She cocks her head at me sending her short, Bettie Page–style bangs shifting across her forehead, before extending her hand. “Amelia Huerta-Peck.”
I shake her hand. “Ethan Kelly.”
“Oh, I know.”
I fail to decipher whether that’s a good or a bad “oh, I know” then turn back to Rebecca. “It’s one of the coolest rings I’ve ever seen.”
Rebecca scoops the ring back up and holds it out to me on her palm. “Good. Because I made it for you.”
I freeze in the loud and suddenly too-warm space. “Seriously?”
“Well, yeah.” Rebecca reaches for my right hand and works the band over the knuckle of my thumb. It’s a perfect fit. “I have a good eye,” she says with a self-satisfied little shrug. She seems to realize that she’s still holding my hand and lets it go suddenly. “You don’t have to wear it all the time or at all if it’s not your thing or whatever. I mean not everyone likes to wear—”
“It’s my thing,” I say. “It’s exactly my thing.” I’ve never been into wearing anything besides clothes, but as soon as the cool metal slides on my thumb, metal that she shaped and designed for me before I’d even come back, I know it’s perfect.
Her chest rises and lowers with a sigh of relief. “Good, because I actually did spend close to a week designing it and if you hated it I don’t think I could have sold it to anyone else and then Amelia would have to threaten to fire me again and she already does that enough.”
“No, not fire.” Amelia leans toward Rebecca and puts an arm around her shoulder. “Dock your pay for the materials and time, oh yeah, but I wouldn’t fire you for that.”
“Hey, I’ll pay for the ring,” I say, praying she didn’t use anything more expensive than hex nuts because Old Man needs to eat and I’d kinda not like to be in debt to my grandparents any more than I already am. “Unless it’s really expensive in which case I hate it.”
“All it cost was my time. Besides it’s a gift, you don’t pay for those.”
I nod like I know all about gifts.
“Hey.” Rebecca angles her head at me, all hint of a smile gone from her face. “Where’d you go just now?”
I suck in a huge breath. “Nowhere I want to stay.”
“Then come back.” She leans forward, angling to watch Amelia retreat back into the office before turning a beaming smile on me. “I’ll even give you a present.”
I hold my ringed hand up. “Another one?”
Still grinning, she moves the heavy apron she’s wearing to the side and reaches into her pocket for a piece of paper. “I spoke to Cindy Wu this morning, you know, the manager of Buffalo Exchange on Melrose? Super nice lady. Kind of a stickler for rules though, so it took me close to an hour before I got her to give me these.”
I take the paper and open it to reveal a list of six names and phone numbers. Stunned, I look up at Rebecca to see her all but shimmying from her success.
“Cindy said those are the people your mom is closest to at work. So if she called somebody, there’s a good chance it was one of them. I haven’t had a chance to—”
I cut off her words as I half tackle hug her. My heart is pounding so hard I can’t even speak.
“You know, a thank-you would have been fine.”
No, it wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have thought to call my mom’s boss and I most definitely wouldn’t have said the right things to get her to give me these names.
“Oh, hey.” Rebecca’s voice comes soft and soothing as her arms wrap around me. “You’re gonna find her. It’s gonna be okay.”
I release her to settle back on my heels, letting one hand slide down and linger on her arm so as to not fully break the contact between us. “I mean I already struck out with calling the rehab center. They just kept saying they weren’t allowed to give out information regarding former patients. But you...” I hold up the paper. “I wouldn’t have anything right now if it weren’t for you.”
“Ethan—”
“No, I mean, I feel like I’ve been this shit friend to you. I didn’t even say goodbye when I left the last time and we both know I would have taken off again the other night if you hadn’t stopped me.”
“You told me you were planning to say goodbye.”
“I told you what I wanted to be true. The truth is I don’t think I could have faced you. All those other times I left, I didn’t have a choice. This time I did and I was still going to do the wrong thing.” Shame weighs my head down.
“You always could have said goodbye, done something besides leaving those flower sketches on my windowsill. Do you know how much I started to hate waking up to those?”
No, I didn’t.
She draws in a breath, waiting a beat and almost shaking herself before saying, “I don’t know what you want me to say here, that it was okay that you took off like that all the time when we were younger or that I’d eventually forgive you if you’d done it again the other night? I can’t say that to you.”
“I’m not expecting that. But I can’t undo what I did either.”
“No, but you can mean it when you tell me you won’t ever leave like that again. When you go this next time—” she tries to shrug, but the gesture looks strained “—promise me more than a flower?”
“I promise,” I say, even as a sliver of guilt coils inside me. If it comes down to my mom needing me, I’m not sure if that’s a promise I can keep. “Then we’re good? You’re helping me find my mom and I’m helping you with...what? Shouldn’t you be getting something out of this too?”
She gives me the strangest look, almost like I hurt her feelings, and wheels back a foot. “How very transactional of you, Ethan.”
I reach after her, resting my hand on the frame of her chair. “I meant that I can do something for you too. Isn’t there anything you need or want?” Something sparks in her eyes, a flash that she tries to conceal but too late. “Anything, Bec. Say the word.” She bites her lip and I can’t help moving closer even as her hesitancy sends a trickle of nervous energy through my bloodstream. “It’s not illegal is it?”
“Nothing illegal,” she assures me, but I have too many memories of us skirting that line as kids to take her word for it now. “There are just a few things I think I want to do before summer ends. I guess you could tag along.”
“What kind of things?”
Her smile creeps back. “You never used to ask when we were younger. What happened to the kid who was up for anything?”
He grew up with a mother whose entire life was lived that way. It wasn’t as fun when you didn’t know where you were gonna sleep at night. But I’m not ready to tell her that so instead I remind her about my tattoo. “He let a cackling twelve-year-old ink a wobbly sun on his back and has been wary ever since.”
Rebeca leans toward me bringing a whiff of honey and sunscreen with her and I know I’m about to agree to anything she asks. “I’ll meet you at your pool after work and I promise to let you help me with the first nonillegal item on my list. Deal?”
“Deal,” I say, waiting for a shiver of apprehension that never comes.
She moves to the entrance then looks back at me when I don’t follow her. “What?”
I shake my head and join her, pushing open the outside door for us. “Just thinking about how I was never worried about anything when we were together as kids. I thought that might have faded, but...”
She hesitates and I see her throat move as she swallows. “Ethan Kelly. Are you trying to tell me I make you feel safe?”
There’s an intensity in her glance that’s making me feel a lot of things, too much and all at once, so I step out into the fresh air and suck in a deep breath before glancing back at her over my shoulder. “Maybe ask me again later tonight, yeah?” I wait for her to return my half smile before adding, “And after your thing, I could maybe use some company for these calls in case I start to say the wrong thing.”
Rebecca pushes down the ramp, the incline temporarily allowing her to outpace me. “I think you underestimate yourself.”
I jog ahead to pick up a tiny branch from in front of her, surprised how natural it feels to scan the road for rocks or small stuff when I’m with her. “But you’ll be there? With me?”
Her eyes trail the branch as I toss it away and when she looks at me again I feel like I just lifted a car or something. It’s a nice feeling.
“There’s nowhere else I’d want to be.”