Chapter 14: Petra and the Thing That Wore Her Mother's Face

The first thing Petra noticed was the smell.

Not the garage smell — Quaker State and solvents and the particular sweet-rot of old rubber — but underneath that, wrong-underneath-that, the way a note played in the wrong key sits beneath a song and ruins it without you being able to say exactly why. It was a wet mineral smell. Cold and ancient and pleased with itself.

She was three-quarters of the way through reseating the valve cover on Mr. Antecki's 1968 Buick Skylark, which her father had quoted at two hours and which had taken her father four and a half before he'd handed it to her with the expression he used when he'd decided something was beneath further investment of his personal dignity. Petra did not find it beneath her. Petra found it interesting, the way it did not behave like it should, the way the bolts had been overtorqued by the previous owner until the threads were just barely holding their opinion about remaining intact.