The garage shuts at six

My car is a 2009 Palio and it makes a noise. Not a serious noise. A short squeal when I start it cold in the morning, about eight seconds, then gone.

My father ran a garage in Diadema for twenty-two years. I spent my whole childhood under cars holding a torch. I know what that noise is.

Zé Bento's place is on the street behind mine, opens at seven, shuts at six, and the one who deals with customers is Nando.

"Water pump," he says, on the first visit, barely lifting the bonnet.

"Belt tensioner."

He looks at me the way men look when a woman says a word they weren't expecting.

"Madam knows about cars?"

"Don't call me madam."

"The lady knows about cars?"

"Worse."

He changes the water pump. Two hundred and eighty for the part, plus labour.

The noise carries on.

I go back the following Thursday at twenty to six, on purpose, because I want to see his face with the working day running out.

He listens to the engine. Crouches by the wing with a hand on the cam cover, and I stand there with my arms folded saying nothing, which is a form of cruelty I learned from my father.

"It isn't the pump," he says.

"What a shame."

"Fine. Go on."

"Tensioner."

"Tensioner."

"That noise is the tensioner bearing with play in it. Cold, it squeals. It warms up, the metal expands, it stops. Eight seconds."

He stands. Wipes his hands on a rag that cleans nothing.

"If it's the tensioner, the labour's on me."

"If it's the tensioner you're buying me dinner."

"If it's the tensioner I'll buy you two."

The part takes nine days to arrive because the supplier sends the one for the 1.4 and mine is a 1.0.

In those nine days I call in at the garage three times. Two of them I didn't need to.

The second time he has half an engine open on the bench, the parts laid out on a sheet of cardboard in the exact order they came off. I stand there looking at it for longer than manners allow.

"You lay them out like that because you're afraid of forgetting."

"I lay them out like that because I forgot once."

Things I notice about Nando between the second visit and the third, in order of seriousness:

He has a barcode tattooed on his left forearm. Got it at nineteen. It works: run a scanner over it and you get condensed milk, national brand, 395-gram tin. He's tested it at the supermarket. He tells me this laughing at himself, which is a rare quality in a man of thirty-five.

He keeps a small notebook in which he has written the mileage of every car that has come through the workshop since 2019.

And he listens to an engine with his head tilted, one eye half shut, exactly the way my father listened. That irritates me more than I'm going to admit out loud.

My father died in 2021. I sold his tools to a man from Santo André for a price I know was bad, kept a pair of needle-nose pliers, and kept the habit of folding my arms when somebody is wrong.

It isn't about that. I know it looks like it's about that. It isn't.

Tuesday. Ten to six.

I arrive and the part is out on the bench, with the new one boxed beside it. He puts the old bearing in my hand without a word. I spin it. There's play. There's so much play you can hear it.

"Two dinners," I say.

"You're unbearable."

"So was my father."

Zé Bento leaves at six on the dot because his wife serves dinner at seven. The other lad went at five. That leaves us, the workshop, and the steel shutter half down, at about waist height, the way it sits when somebody is still inside.

He goes to wash his hands at the sink out the back. I follow with no reason whatsoever.

Workshop soap is the paste kind, sand-coloured, and it scrapes. He scrubs until his fingers go red.

"You've been coming here three weeks over an eight-second squeal," he says, with his back to me.

"I have."

"The noise has stopped."

"It has."

He turns the tap off. Doesn't turn round.

"Well then."

I don't answer, and the not answering takes up more room in that workshop than anything I could have said.

Then he turns round.

The office is a box three metres by two with a Formica desk, a pedestal fan and a 2017 calendar on the wall, sponsored by a shock-absorber factory, with a photograph of a motorbike on it.

I think about the calendar for roughly four seconds and after that I don't think about anything.

He lifts me by the waist onto the desk, and the desk complains, and he shoves the keyboard and an empty mug into the corner with his forearm. The mug goes over. Neither of us looks.

His mouth tastes of coffee with too much sugar in it.

His hands still smell of workshop soap, and that ought to be a problem, and it isn't.

He stops halfway, one hand at the back of my neck, and asks whether this is all right. I tell him yes. He asks again later, quieter, and I tell him yes again, and that is the thing I'll remember in February of the following year, when somebody asks me why him.

At some point the compressor kicks in by itself outside, that bang and then the drone, and we both genuinely jump, and I laugh into his mouth with my heart going, and he says something I can't hear over the compressor.

I ask him to say it again. He doesn't.

The office chair is one of those on castors, and is therefore good for nothing, and we establish this in the worst possible way, and it's the only part of the evening I tell my friends about.

Ten past seven. He pulls the shutter down from outside and padlocks it.

We eat pastéis standing up at the street market on Bresser, because both plastic tables are taken. He pays for two, as agreed. I order a third and he complains and pays for that as well.

"You still owe me," I say.

"I owe you?"

"You changed a water pump that didn't need changing."

He laughs with his mouth full. It isn't attractive. I go on looking.

The car is fine. Starts clean, cold, hot, in the rain.

In September I hear a knock in the front suspension going over the speed bump on my street.

I'm taking it in on Tuesday. Ten to six.

I'm not going to tell you whether the knock is real.