The Last Tank

The first thing I knew about that morning was the sound of a man crying in our front bay, and even half-asleep I could tell it was the kind of crying a grown man does when he has run out of other options.

I sat up in the dark. The volcano was grumbling somewhere above the town, the way it does before sunrise — a low, indifferent rumble like something heavy being dragged across a wooden floor in another room. Through the thin wall between my bedroom and the shop, I could hear Don Beto trying to breathe quietly and failing.

I pulled my father's old work shirt over my tank top, didn't bother with shoes, and tucked the chewed pencil behind my ear without thinking, the way other women put on earrings. The concrete in the hallway was cold. The concrete in the bay was colder. From the kitchen drifted the smell of cardamom — Mamá's coffee, already on, because Mamá always knows before the rest of us when something is wrong.

Don Beto was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket in the middle of the bay, under the one fluorescent tube that buzzes like a trapped wasp. His shoulders were shaking. In one fist he held a piece of paper crumpled so tight it had gone soft at the edges. His taxi — a 2008 Toyota Yaris he treats better than most men treat their wives — sat ten feet away with its hood closed, perfectly fine.

"Don Beto." I said it the way you say a name to a dog you don't want to startle. "¿Qué pasó, mae?"

He looked up. His eyes were red and wet and embarrassed. He is sixty-three years old. He has driven for the Turrialba cooperative since before I was born. He once changed my bicycle tire when I was nine and refused to let me pay him in the two thousand colones I had saved from selling lemons.

"Nada, mija," he said. "Nada. Es una tontería."

It's nothing. It's a stupidity.

He held out the receipt anyway, because he had come here to show someone, and now there was someone here. I took it from him gently, the way you take a sleeping baby from a tired mother. To give him the dignity of being heard by a number and not a face, I read it out loud.

"Cuarenta y siete mil colones."

Forty-seven thousand. One tank. The number landed in the bay like a wrench dropped on concrete, and Don Beto put his face in his hands, and the bay was quiet except for the buzzing tube and the volcano.

Headlights swung across the open door. The Hiace pulled in, its diesel rattle settling into idle, and my brother killed the engine. Esteban climbed out slowly, the way he climbs out of everything lately, like his knees know something the rest of him is trying not to know yet.

He took in the scene — Don Beto on the bucket, me with the receipt, the closed hood on the Yaris that did not need fixing — and his face did a small private thing I hate, which is the look he gets when he is doing math he has already done.

He did not show me his receipt. But I could see it folded in his shirt pocket, small and white as a wound he was trying not to bleed on anything.

"Beto," he said softly, and put a hand on the older man's shoulder, and then he could not seem to think of the next sentence. He looked away — at the calendar from 2017 with the volcano erupting on it, the one Papá refuses to take down because the picture is good. He looked anywhere but at me.

My chest did the flooded-carburetor thing. You know — when the air can't get through and the fuel can't burn and the whole engine just sits there sputtering. I went to the bench, poured coffee from Mamá's thermos into a chipped mug that says SOLANO in faded letters, and pressed it into Don Beto's hands. I didn't say anything, because nothing useful had occurred to me yet, and saying useless things to a man holding a forty-seven-thousand-colón receipt felt like another kind of cruelty.

The house door opened. Papá came down in his slippers and the old grey sweatpants he sleeps in, his hair flattened on one side. He stopped in the doorway, looked at Don Beto, looked at the receipt sticking out of my hand, looked at his son's face. He did not look at me at all, which is how I knew he had already understood.

"Ay, hombre," Papá said. "Qué barbaridad."

Four words. Then he walked over, dragged the second bucket beside the first, and sat down next to Don Beto without touching him. That is how the men of his generation sit with each other in grief — close enough that their knees almost meet, far enough that nobody has to pretend it isn't happening.

I watched my father's hands. They are big and grease-striped and have rebuilt every kind of engine this town has ever owned. They are the hands I learned the world from. I love them more than I love almost anything, and watching them now, useless against this particular kind of broken thing — a price, a number, a math problem you cannot torque to spec — I felt two things at once.

Fierce love.

And a hot, almost shameful certainty that he was about to be left behind by something he could not fix with a wrench. And that I had seen it coming for months, and had not known how to say it, and now it was sitting on a bucket in our bay drinking my mother's coffee.

I drifted to the workbench, because that is where I drift when I cannot stand still. Papá's Haynes manual was open, as it always is, to the carburetor diagrams. Soft pages, soft as cloth. His tiny capital letters in the margins: AJUSTAR MEZCLA. LIMPIAR JET PRINCIPAL. NO FORZAR.

Don't force it.

I turned Don Beto's receipt over in my hand. The back of it was blank.

I took the pencil from behind my ear.

I didn't decide to. My hand has its own opinions. When I am thinking hard, it draws spark plug gaps on napkins, on the corners of grocery lists, on the inside cover of whatever book I happen to be reading. That morning, on the back of a forty-seven-thousand-colón receipt for gasoline, my hand drew something it had never drawn before.

A rectangle the size of a Hiace's underbelly.

Divided into modules.

A column of small squares for battery cells, neat as a chocolate bar. A circle where the transmission tunnel would be, with an arrow labeled MOTOR. A dotted line tracing where the high-voltage cable would run forward, up under the dash. A small ring on the rear quarter panel — a charge port, behind where the fuel door used to live.

I had never drawn this. I had been drawing this my whole life.

My hand was steadier than my stomach. In the back of my head, the fact I have been carrying around for months like a smooth stone in my pocket: this country runs on water and wind and the breath of volcanoes. Ninety-nine percent renewable. The Turrialba River roars two kilometers from this bay, spinning turbines for free, and every morning my brother burns gasoline he cannot afford to drive people to work.

Diay.

It is the only word for it. A sigh shaped like a country.

Behind me, the kitchen door creaked. Mamá came out with a wooden tray — four little cups, the small steel pitcher, the sugar in the dish with the chipped lid. She crossed the bay without a sound. Set the tray on the workbench beside me. Took in everything in one slow look — the weeping driver, the silent husband, the daughter hunched over a piece of paper she was hiding with her elbow.

She didn't say anything to the men.

As she passed me, she laid her hand briefly on the back of my neck. Just for a second. The way she did when I was eight and feverish and she was checking whether to call the doctor. Her hand was warm and dry and smelled like cardamom and dish soap.

She leaned down. Her voice was meant for one person.

"Termínalo bien, mi amor."

Finish it properly.

Then she straightened, and went back inside, and the screen door tapped shut behind her, and I stood at the bench with the receipt under my hand and my whole face hot.

She had seen it. Maybe months ago. Maybe the first time my hand drew a battery cell on the edge of the grocery list and I crumpled it into the trash before anyone could ask.

I folded the receipt in half. Then in half again. I slid it into the back pocket of my jeans. My hand was shaking and I could not tell whether it was fear or something worse, which is hope. Hope is the more dangerous one. Fear at least keeps you small. Hope makes you reach for things.

The morning organized itself, the way mornings do. Don Beto finished his coffee. Papá walked him out to the Yaris with one hand on his back. They stood in the road talking softly for a long time, the kind of talk that is mostly silences, and then Don Beto got in and drove away into the grey light, and Papá watched the taillights until they turned the corner.

When Papá came back inside, he didn't look at me. He went straight to the second bay, opened the hood of someone's Land Cruiser, and started in on a job that didn't need starting yet. That is what he does when he doesn't have words. He finds a bolt to turn.

I took the inventory clipboard and went to the second bay too — the far one, around the corner from him — and pretended to count brake pads. I counted the same shelf three times. The numbers kept sliding off the page.

That is where Esteban found me.

He came around the corner quietly, the way he moves when Papá is within earshot. He glanced toward the open bay door. Listened for the clink of a wrench against the Land Cruiser's frame. Satisfied, he stepped close.

"Mari."

"Mae."

He wet his lips. He has Mamá's mouth, which means when he is nervous it goes thin and almost disappears.

"There's a meeting tonight," he said. "At La Esperanza. The cooperative."

"Okay."

He glanced at the bay door again.

"Don Wálter called it."

I set the clipboard down on a stack of tires. Carefully, the way you set down a glass that already has a crack in it.

"Don Wálter called the meeting," I repeated, because saying it out loud sometimes makes a thing smaller. It did not make this smaller.

"He wants to make us an offer." Esteban's voice dropped further. "All the independents. He wants to buy us out, mae. Roll us into one fleet. We fuel only at his pumps. On his credit. On his terms."

He said it the way you report weather you cannot change. Flat. A little apologetic. As if he had personally caused the storm.

In the front bay, the Hiace was ticking as its engine cooled — that small, patient sound a hot engine makes giving its heat back to the morning. Up the mountain, the volcano cleared its throat, a long low rumble that rattled the loose pane in the office window.

I put my hand in my back pocket.

The receipt was still there. Folded twice. Warm from my body. The corners sharp through the denim.

An hour ago it had been a doodle.

Now it had a date on it, and the date was tonight.

"Pura vida," I said quietly, to no one, and I did not mean it at all.