The Mechanic

-Chapter Six-

"Does Pipes look like me?"

She snorts. "Well, she's cute. So I'm not sure."

"Hey," I mutter, trying to decide if her voice had a playful undertone.

"She looks a bit like you. Around the mouth, maybe."

"I have a big mouth?"

"I guess." When I look back at her, she's laughing at me. I can see it in her eyes.

She turns back to the stove, dumping in one can of stuff after the other. "She looks more like her mama. Big eyes, round face." She stirs the concoction that she's making for a moment. "You know. She just looks like her mother. But she does have a mouth like yours and her daddy's, so she looks like both of you, too."

"Interesting take on it," I say. I pick Piper up and hold her on my shoulder the way Femi does, but she squirms, so I set her back on the blanket.

I don't know why she likes Femi more, but she obviously does. Content, she sticks her fist in her mouth.

"Babies are weird."

"Aww. Piper isn't weird. Get away from her, meanie." She comes over and scoops her up, settles her on her hip.

I lay back on the blanket and close my eyes. "I don't know why Matt said I had to come over and help you," I sigh. "You don't like me and you seem to have it all under control."

"I don't dislike you," she offers, voice squeaking.

"You did last I checked."

"I am constantly changing, Paris Verloren. Like a tree, I shed my leaves season after season. They change, leave, come back. And I do believe that it's almost springtime. It's in your favor. I mean, I might not feel an urge to kill you, after all."

I raise my eyebrows, eyes locked on a crack in the ceiling. "Joking, right?"

"Maybe," she teases. Hopefully she's teasing.

I continue to stare at the ceiling, running my thoughts through over and over, trying to separate certainties from uncertainties, jokes from facts. Jokes are kind of like lies, if you think about it.

I've decided that sometimes I don't like them.

After a while of just stirring stew and whispering things to Piper, Femi directs something at me.

"What did your love look like?"

"Huh?" I sit up and look over at her, but she has her back to me.

"What did she look like?"

"Why do you care?" I ask, frowning. She's hit a nerve. A time-hardened one, maybe, but still a nerve. I don't like it.

She shrugs. "I'm curious. I mean, I've met you. I've seen the bird on the wall. She must have been something else."

I nod slowly, considering. Femi is nosey. She won't stop. She picks and picks and picks, and I think that she's picked at Matt, too. Wondering about the girl I loved, who I can't find it in myself to remember. Somehow, I forgot. Last week I could see her like she was part of me, and now I can't even remember what color hair she had.

Why?

At last, I lick my lips and look up to the ceiling. "Well, she was something else, I suppose." And I stop. I don't know what else to say. "And, uh... she was beautiful. But she wasn't the normal kind of beautiful. It was all in the way she was."

She cocks her head, not looking at me still, but stirring the stew. "She wasn't pretty physically, then?"

"Oh, she was. But it wasn't what made her beautiful." I sigh, wracking my brain for more explanations. "She was soft, somehow. Even though she'd been living with other people's hatred, she was unmarked. The world hadn't gotten to her yet. She wasn't hurt."