AN: This chapter comes with a disclaimer. That disclaimer is that I do not like this chapter. I'm not sure why I don't like it and I'm not sure what I would do to fix it besides scrap the whole thing. That being said, I'm not going to scrap it because I wrote it after work and I'm too tired to scrap what I did with my free time after work. LOL It's got some things that needed to be covered to move onto future chapters that I hope to write better and more to my liking. I guess this is one of those kind of transition chapters that happens sometimes as a necessary evil. I hope that you'll forgive me for this one just not being good. I may get one of the future (and hopefully better) chapters out soon to try to make up for it a little.

I hope it's not terrible. :-/ Sorry.

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"Sophia, you're not talking about down there at Robert McLurey's shop are you? Mac's shop?" Carol asked. She'd asked Sophia where she'd been and Sophia had somewhat gaily informed her that she had a job…at a shop. Carol had, of course, thought that she'd been talking about some place to go shopping, but as she continued to detail what she'd be doing there, Carol was realizing that Sophia was not considering working at some boutique somewhere.

"That's it," Sophia said, stabbing her broccoli. "Mac's. Mac's the old guy, though, but he's not the only one there."

Carol sat there, once again not sure what she was supposed to do in this situation. Sophia seemed thrilled about her job, but Carol knew that a place like Mac's was very probably not a place that would be good for a girl Sophia's age. She couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of role models the people that worked there were.

"Sophia," Carol said, "are there any women there?"

Sophia shook her head.

"There's Mac and Wren. Then there's Merle but Mac and Wren call him Dixon, and then there's Daryl, but they like to call him Double D," Sophia said.

Carol shuddered a little and curled her lip without being able to control it at the thought of how one might land such a nickname as "Double D".

"Sophia," Carol said, "I know of Robert McLurey, and I know of Robert Wren as well…I don't know about the other two. They're not exactly the best company for young girls."

"They're cool guys," Sophia said. "They run their mouths a lot, but they're funny."

"They're a rough crowd, Sophia," Carol said. "Mac's been in jail a few times and Wren's been there plenty of times. It's probably not the kind of atmosphere you want to be in…"

Sophia looked at her, her eyes almost burning into her and she pressed her lips together in the manner that almost made them disappear.

"The deal was I go to school and I tell you where I'm going to be after school," Sophia said. "I'm telling you that I got a job at the shop and that's where I'm going to be after school."

Carol sighed. She supposed there could be worse things that the girl could be doing besides working at a shop after school, but she couldn't help but wonder what kind of environment that was for a fifteen, almost sixteen, year old girl. She didn't know the men well, but they had reputations and they weren't the most shining reputations ever.

Still, she wasn't sure that she wanted to try to tell Sophia that she couldn't do this. She didn't need to add any pressure to rebel on the young girl. Her run away fiasco showed that she clearly wasn't afraid of rebellion in the slightest. The fact that she was agreeing to go to school and then to come back to the house and leave some indication of her whereabouts was a huge deal at the moment. Carol only wished that her preferred whereabouts were a little more positive.

Carol decided, though, that she wasn't going to have the fight with the girl right now. She would go up there the next day, before Sophia got out of school, and she would speak to Mac herself. She'd check out the environment and see exactly what they were dealing with. She could tolerate their poor influence if they were just rough spoken men…but if any of them seemed less than trustworthy she wasn't going to let Sophia put herself in a position to be taken advantage of.

"You're right," Carol said, "and I'm glad that you have kept your end of the bargain. You did a nice job on the front yard, and you did let me know where you were going."

Sophia didn't respond to her for a few moments. She chewed her food and stared at her plate.

"I'll do the backyard this weekend," Sophia said. "It's going to take at least all day Saturday. Have you ever even cut back there before?"

Carol could tell there was a little bite to Sophia's voice that hadn't been there when she'd been recounting how she got her new job.

"Not as often as I should have," Carol said. "Got away from me."

Carol let the conversation die down and as soon as Sophia had finished eating, she declared that she had homework to do and disappeared upstairs to work on whatever it was that the school had given her to finish up.

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Sophia knew that two dollars an hour for after school work was hardly going to make her wealthy by the end of her month's stay, but it would at least be something in her pocket and that was more than she had at the moment.

She'd never had a job before. She'd never been settled in any one place long enough to even consider such an idea. Now, though, she could at least pick up a few bucks that would help her out when she had to hit the road.

Sophia lie on her bed staring up at the ceiling. The woman, Carol, seemed concerned about her job, but Sophia didn't think that the men at the shop were anything to be concerned about. She'd been around just about every kind of man that she could imagine, and these men weren't like some of the ones that she'd met. These men were mouthy, but they weren't the hands on kinds of characters that she'd learned to watch out for when she went to new families. They just liked to gossip, cuss, and tell raunchy jokes, and to tell the truth, she was kind of fond of them already. She thought the three older ones were entertaining, and there was something about Daryl that was interesting, even if he was kind of a stick in the mud.

The fact that Carol seemed so concerned about her was strange to Sophia. The woman had seemed more concerned over dinner about her job sweeping some nasty shop floor than she'd seemed the day before when she was sitting on her bathtub bleeding everywhere and shoving sewing needles through her skin.

Carol was odd, to say the least, and unlike any of the people that Sophia had lived with so far. She was pretty quiet and seemed to keep to herself. She wasn't trying to shove anything down Sophia's throat so far. The rules weren't all that abnormal. Every house Sophia had been in so far had come with rules, and she had to admit that Carol's were less dramatic than many of them she'd been expected to memorize. She wasn't trying to enforce any particular religious beliefs on Sophia, she didn't have any chore charts hanging around, she hadn't implemented any kind of "sticker" reward programs for Sophia's "good behavior"…she hadn't started any of the corny "super parent" projects that the other fosters had going on for Sophia's benefit. Sophia hadn't even seen any of the obnoxious parent books lying around. It was almost like Carol hadn't been practicing for her bouncing baby that ended up being a little too big for the ridiculous things she tried to put in place.

Sophia wasn't sure what to think of the woman at all. She didn't dislike her, not as much as she thought she would. She was more or less indifferent to her at this point, though she was beginning to wonder more about her. Usually by now she'd gotten the delightful "introduction to the family" that she glossed over. Carol hadn't offered her any such business. She wouldn't even know her last name if it wasn't scribbled across the piece of yellow legal paper that Sophia kept folded and tucked in her backpack in case she might need the information.

Everything that Sophia knew about the woman she shared a house with, essentially, could fit on an eight and a half by eleven piece of paper.

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Carol already phoned in to tell the woman she worked with, Jacqui, that she would only be putting in half a day the next day. She didn't really want Sophia to know that she was checking up on the job at the shop. Sophia might see it as her disbelieving that she was working there, when in reality it had a lot more to do with whether or not the men could be trusted to be around the girl.

Carol sat in the chair in the corner of the bedroom with the manila folder open, flipping through the pages again. She didn't know what to think about the teenager that was upstairs right now…sleeping or doing homework or doing whatever it was she did when she was alone.

The manila folder was depressing, and the more that Carol flipped through it, the more depressing she found it. Inside the front cover was a picture of Sophia, much younger…the blurb attached there said she had been almost eleven at the time. The information given was less informative than the jackets of most books that Carol had seen. The first eleven years of the girl's life were reduced to a few sentences.

Her father abandoned her. Her mother died of an overdose.

The information beyond that wasn't informative in the slightest. Sophia's first eleven years were only summed up in the information that Carol received as details about her parents. They weren't even informative details. They were simply, basic pieces of information that told whoever was Sophia's current foster parent how it was that she ended up being without her original parents.

And then there were other pieces of papers. Reports here and there, things that Carol didn't understand, other pictures, details about immunizations, school records. Inside the cover of this folder…her "information packet", Sophia was reduced to data and a few sparse details mostly telling about everything the girl had done that was less than satisfactory, apparently, to the previous families that had been responsible for her.

And there had been more than a few families.

Carol wondered how much about Sophia's life wasn't considered important to put into the packet. Was there anything there that wasn't some detail about a fight at school or difficulty she caused in the home?

Carol wondered if there had been birthday parties and trips to the fair. She wondered what had happened with first bicycles and if Sophia had ever wanted a pony or if she'd been the aquarium. Who had been there when she'd fallen down and scraped her knees? Carol wondered what there was to her life that wasn't in the folder…she wondered if anyone had ever been responsible for all the things that she remembered fondly when she thought back to her own childhood. Or had Sophia always simply been a "troubled" child with a laundry list of strikes?

Carol wondered what was going to happen in a month's time. It would be Sophia's choice, as far as she could see, as to what happened. If things continued as they were she really had no reason to tell the girl she had to go. If Sophia wanted to stay, then Carol thought she should.

She didn't know, though, if she hoped the girl would stay or not. There was something nice about having someone in the house…about knowing that when she got home from work there was someone to make dinner for…someone else to think about. It was different having Sophia there than it had been having Ed there, clearly, and this presence was one that she didn't mind having around her. Still, she couldn't really say that she hoped the girl would decide to stay. She supposed that if Sophia chose to leave she would simply adjust to living alone again, and that would be that. It wasn't as though she felt any real attachment to her ward.

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Daryl had the music all but turned off while he worked, finally alone in the shop. He didn't need the background noise when he was alone. The only reason he left it on at all, really, was because the one time he'd turned the radio off it had caused something to short circuit or some shit like that and Mac had spent half the next day fixing it and cussing the whole damn time. Now Daryl just turned it down until it was barely an annoying hum in the background and let the men turn it back up the next day when they came in.

When he worked on his cars…his cars…he didn't need any sound at all. That was his time to get lost in the cars themselves. It was also his time to sort out anything that needed dealing with in his life. That was when he solved problems with Merle, handled financial situations, or made decisions about if and when he'd leave one shop to travel to another and for whatever reason relocate himself and his brother.

Merle could care less either way. He followed Daryl around as though he were just as stuck to the bottom of his feet as his own shadow was. Merle didn't have to be concerned with what was happening in his life so long as he stuck to Daryl. He could just sort of coast right on through and let Daryl handle the details. That's how it had been for a long time. Merle said it was owing to the fact that Daryl had a head for thing like finances and planning. Daryl figured it was more owing to the fact that Merle had a head that was too often under the influence of some form of artificial happiness.

When he wasn't mulling over his own life situations, he preferred to spend his time thinking about the cars he worked on. For most of the people he'd known that had done body work, they'd seen cars merely as hunks of metal to be reshaped, painted, and passed on. That was it.

Daryl preferred, in some odd way, to get to know his cars, and he felt like that might be the secret as to why he was a better body man than most. He liked to imagine how the car got to where it was. At some point it had been some brand spanking new piece of machinery. The nicest car some bastard ever owned even. It had even once smelled like a new car.

So what had taken it from being shiny and factory perfect to wasting away in some junkyard somewhere? What exactly had been the moment when it went from being someone's reliable mode of transportation to being an entirely forgotten scrap of metal doomed one day for the scrapyard?

For some reason, imagining what the cars had once been was a little sad to Daryl. It always had been, ever since he'd seen his first junked classic. It was terrible to him to think how willing people were, in really every walk of life, to just throw things away. Nothing was really sacred to anyone. As soon as the "good" was gone out of something, it just didn't matter anymore.

His musings, though, made it all that more exciting as he worked. With the image in his head of what the car had once been he could work to make it even better. He knew, through every step of the process, that at the end of all the work and all cuts and burns and hours spent working when he probably should have been sleeping, the car was going to be something even more impressive than it had been in the beginning. It was going to be a real head turner. Car connoisseurs everywhere were going to stop and look when they saw it, and people were going to want to own it more than they had even when it was fresh out the factory.

That was the best part about Daryl's job. He felt like he could get attached to the cars. It was safe to get attached to them. He learned about them, sympathized with them, helped them, and at the end of it all he knew he sent them off even better than they'd ever been before.

If they'd had feelings, they would have appreciated it…probably hailed him their hero.

But Daryl wasn't stupid and he wasn't crazy. He knew the cars didn't have feelings, and it was a good damn thing they didn't. If they did they'd have to know how fucked up it was that they'd landed in junkyard condition in the first place. He also knew that if they had feelings he probably wouldn't be able to work with them like he did.

Daryl didn't do feelings. He had feelings, of course…he wasn't made of steel like the cars that he worked on…but he didn't do feelings. Every single time in his pretty much worthless life that he could remember giving a damn about anyone or anything besides his cars, it had always been fucked up for him. Letting yourself give a damn was about the same as setting yourself up for people to fuck you. It was a whole lot easier to just let them fuck themselves and stay away from shit like feelings. No good could come from it any damn way.

That's one reason Daryl had spent most of his life with Merle and nobody but Merle. Merle didn't do feelings either and it was a hell of a lot easier for the brothers to get through life that way. They lived together, but Daryl couldn't really say whether or not they loved each other since they didn't bother to talk about that shit, and that was it. There wasn't anyone else in their lives to really fuck them up.

They had acquaintances, Merle more so than Daryl, with whom they worked and drank. Merle was a womanizer of sorts and believed in the hump 'em and dump 'em lifestyle. Daryl had employed Merle's tactics probably three or four times in his life when he decided to give into some of his natural urges, but the truth was he didn't care for the practice. Whether or not you wanted feelings to get involved, and whether or not he let them, women had a tendency to get more emotional than he liked about those things. He hadn't liked the whole promise to call later moment when he'd known good and well he wasn't going to call.

No, Daryl didn't do feelings. The only ones he was comfortable with were the ones that he shared, just like he was doing now, with the beauties that took shape under his fingertips. Those were the only things that really got into his blood.

Daryl dared a glance at the clock and groaned to himself. Because of the excitement of their little visitor today, everyone had felt the need to stand around gossiping like old ladies at the beauty parlor after work. You'd think none of the assholes had ever been in the same room with a kid before. Their little chit chat session had pretty much shaved two hours off of Daryl's work time, and now he was going to have to wrap it up soon if he was going to get some sleep and not be just as worthless as the others at work the tomorrow morning.

Daryl finished up with the quarter panel he was working on and put it in the backseat of the car for safe keeping until morning. He switched off the lights to the shop and stepped out, locking the door. If he was lucky the assholes would go home earlier the next day and he might actually make some progress on his coupe. As he walked back toward his trailer, he tried to occupy his mind with the problem he still hadn't solved…the very important problem of what color he wanted to paint the car when it was time to show the world the beauty it had become under his careful craftsmanship.