The Funeral of a Good Girl

By – TempestRaces

Chapter 68 – Of Being Different and Defining Normal

AN: I am among the apparent few who thought the fourth movie was almost all garbage. I didn't really like it. I laughed a few times, but I felt a lot of it was just poor.

They drove home, and managed to get downstairs without being seen by anyone straggling in like drowned rats half dressed. They went to bed, and Vince expected to be lulled into sleep quickly by the driving rain on his window, but he wasn't. He gave up on sleeping after several hours of tossing and turning next to her still form. His issues with sleep were clearly not hers as well. Despite being deprived of her common resting place against his side by his unrestive conduct; she was deeply unaware of his unrest. She made soft, yet content noises as she breathed deeply and rhythmically in the arms of Morpheus, curled on her side with a hand under her cheek, the other holding the blanket securely under her chin.

He rolled onto his side to watch her. At first to be irate that she was sleeping so peacefully while he was awake, and not happy about it at all. But it was hard to stay mad watching something so calm. He felt sure she was dreaming, as her eyes flicked from side to side behind closed lids and he couldn't help but wonder of what she dreamt. Was it of him? Or of fame and notoriety on the streets?

These thoughts made him realize that he really didn't know her well enough to speculate on what else she might dream of in the night.

Did she dream of a home and family? He knew she had her own place to reside, but that was just a house. Did she dream of a home with a fence and kids in the yard? Or was that simply something he envisioned women dreaming of? Something he had never known, and thus didn't know how to put in his own dreams of the future, let alone if he actually wanted it or not?

She had no responsibility to anyone other than herself and her dog, but was that by choice, or just the lack of other options presenting themselves? Or was she too young yet to even contemplate the alternatives to her single life.

And why was he thinking about all of it now, when she was due to leave as soon as tomorrow? What made him contemplate what she might want for her future, and what he might, and how the two might mesh now, when it was practically too late to do anything about it? Was that why it was ok tonight? Because it was a safe topic at this late stage? Because there was nothing that could be done to change the outcome now, no matter the answers to his hypothetical questions? Because by the day after tomorrow she'd be nothing but a ghost of a smile and a whiff of a foreign scent on his pillow?

They awoke mutually the next morning to the sound of Dominic yelling at them through the closed door while he pounded on it. "Both of you get the fuck up and get dressed. We got all our own shit to do before tonight and about 10 cars to clear out of the shop before dinner. You wanna eat tonight you can get the fuck up and help." It was clear Dom was not amused to yet again know they were sleeping in the same room. Forgone conclusion or not.

Vince groaned before rolling over to look at the clock. 10am flashed in his face in cheerful red numbers. "Fuck me."

"What time is it?" Tempest moaned unhappily.

"Ten."

"Oh fuck off!"

"He'll be back in 10 anyway. Might as well get up as listen to him every 10 minutes for the next half hour."

"Why do I count against his staff list? He generally goes out of his way to let me know he doesn't rate my mechanical skills." Tempest sneered. "I'm going back to sleep."

"No you ain't. If I have to get up, and Jess has to get up, and Leon has to get up, so do you."

She capitulated with a sigh. "Fine, but I'm not going anywhere until I get a hot shower." The rain had snarled her hair into a rat's nest.

"You better go now and be quick then. I'll go after you but I'm only giving you 10 to be finished."

"Fine," Tempest got up and headed out of the room, a pair of towels tossed over her arm. By the allotted ten minutes later she was back in Vince's room rubbing a towel through her hair. "You gonna get ready or what?" she asked Vince.

"Yeah, I'll meet you upstairs, yeah?"

"Yeah, fine." Vince left the room and Tempest got dressed. She pulled on the first wifebeater she found in her bag, and a pair of jean shorts before donning thick wool socks and shoving her feet in her boots before, leaving the laces hanging, clomping upstairs. She found everyone but Vince sitting around the table waiting for breakfast. She pulled out a chair and reversed it before straddling it, arms resting on the back.

"Thought Vince told you that you were coming down to help out?" Dom growled.

Mia put a bowl of cereal in front of Tempest. "He did," she answered before smiling in thanks at Mia for the breakfast.

"You think that's suitable clothes for working in a shop?"

Tempest looked down at herself mockingly. "My boots got steel toes. What more'd ya want?"

To the surprise of everyone, Dom let it go with a sigh and nothing more said then, "if you burn the shit outta yourself you got no one to blame."

"Yeah dad I get it," she answered with a roll of her eyes.

Dom frowned as he watched Letty try not to laugh out loud and ultimately fail. If his girlfriend liked Tempest, and Leon more than liked her, and Jesse was related to her, and Mia and Tempest seemed to be coming around to each other, and Vince was so head over heels in love with her everyone but Vince knew it already, how could he continue to try and stand in the way of her deciding to stay? He couldn't, was the only answer. But damn he wanted her to go home, and let his carefully arranged life outside prison go back to normal. But Letty didn't like very many chicks, so that had to say something big.

Before he could say anything else, Vince joined the table, Mia started dishing out the food for the morning carnivores, and saying anything else was lost in the rush to get fed, cleaned up and out of the house.

On his way to the shop, Dom couldn't help but ponder. What if his carefully orchestrated normal never returned? Not even after she left? If Vince didn't get over her as quick as Dom figured he would, if he mooned and got depressed and testy, life would be worse than normal. She wouldn't have to work for him. He could find her a job with someone else, much as it'd kill him to give good talent away. Not that it'd kill him any less to admit to her he knew she was talented. Could he actually bring himself to give a female Jesse to another garage? He doubted it. So not only would he have to resign himself to her dating his best friend—his brother—he'd have to work with her every day too. He didn't think he could do it, but he didn't see how he could not.

He decided that her job for the day could be an audition of sorts. She'd mostly pasted all his tests, not that he'd ever tell her that. But if he was going to put a job offer to her, tell her she was welcome to stick around, he had to be sure of her mechanical skills. Because he'd never be sure of her personality. Something about her rubbed him too far wrong. Something to do with how alike they could be, how dangerous it could be, when their control slipped a little. If she stayed, she and Vince would have to get their own place, he couldn't live with her and work with her. Oh man, he was talking about her staying. But when he thought about how much more level Vince was with her around, it made sense. Which didn't mean he had to like it. But he had to figure that Vince saw his opinion of Tempest as a big reason why he wasn't willing to put his neck out and ask her to stick around. So he owed it to his friend to correct the girl's assumption he wouldn't allow her to stick around.

When he pulled into the shop lot and saw her dressed in a black 'beater knotted around her waist and a pair of denim cut off shorts he began to change his mind. Who worked on cars like that? Then when he looked around just how much was waiting on them to get done by 3pm thoughts of anything but handing out jobs left his head.

"Letty, grab the keys to the blue Supra. Some sort of knocking noise, check it out. Leon, there's something electrical up with the injectors on the yellow Civic, it's yours. Jess, there's a turbo and manifold going on that Mitsubishi Eclipse, Vince, water pump change on that black MX-3," Dom gave Vince a nasty look for interrupting him when Vince started to moan about how the water pump was behind the timing belt, "Tempest, there's oil in the coolant on that Grand Am, I know GM is your specialty so you can check into that one, and I'll take the power lacking Golf." Tempest gave him a dirty look, knowing full well she was looking at an upper intake gasket, or a head gasket, or even both, and thus about 4 different tests just to not know if she was replacing one or both even after.

Tempest swung the late 90's Grand Am into her bay. She was already fairly confident it was going to be an upper intake gasket that had failed, but with 80 thousand on the clock, she also knew she was going to be recommending a head gasket change. To do it later would duplicate over half the labour she'd be doing anyway, so it only made sense to change it and eliminate it now. But she also knew to confirm upper intake she'd be compression testing a v-6 and getting to the rear passenger side spark plug hole was a bitch on the transverse v-6 and most mechanics didn't even bother changing it when they did a plug set.

She tuned into a playlist on her ipod and got to work, tuning out the rest of the garage and her surroundings. It might be a concern for health and safety that she couldn't hear a thing, but she didn't care. She did her best work in her own little world and her world had a soundtrack background.

She had five of the six sparks out of the block, lined up in cylinder order and was pondering if she was going to bother trying to get the sixth out now when she already had uneven readings on the other five and the heads clearly had to come off anyway when someone tapped her shoulder. She took her time looking around, watching for the results of her cylinder bleed down test on number four before she stood up and looked to see who was waiting. It was Vince, who made a motion beside his head indicating she should kill the music. She pulled the earphones out of her ears, "yeah?"

"Its lunch time. You stoppin to eat?"

Tempest stretched up and over, cracking her back which had a kink in the small due to being bent over under a hood for so long without a break. "Yeah, I need a drink."

Vince tucked a tendril of curling hair behind her ear. The rest had been messily restrained in a ball from which curls escaped all over on the back of her head. "You don't want a burger or a sandwich?"

"Yeah, I'll eat something, but I really need a god damn Pepsi more than I want my next breath." Tempest glanced back at the engine she was working on. "And to not have to pull the heads off this thing."

"You sure you have to?" Vince asked.

"Naw, thought I'd do it for shits and giggles." She rolled her eyes. "Generally when the cylinders don't hold pressure on the leak down test and have uneven compression across the whole rear bank, you're looking at head gasket problems. Unless in the almost two years since college I've forgotten everything I learned while I've actually been doing this job all day every day for those two years. Or this car is one of the rare ones that will need new piston rings with only 80k on the clock."

"I was just askin'."

"And I bet it'd go over real well if I started 'just askin' if you were sure you were doing your job right."

She's made her point well enough. "We goin' out to eat or waiting to see what everyone else is doin'?"

She shrugged. "Whatever's quick. If I'm supposed to have this done today I don't have a lot of time."

"It's doubtful you're gonna have a head gasket changed in an afternoon."

"Depends what I find when I get it off. It generally is the upper intake that's gone on these, and you just change the head gasket while you're in there. This one's got uneven compression and its leaking out of a couple consecutive cylinders, so the head gasket might be gone between them too. But it's doubtful that the head needs to be planed. If we can get parts and it comes apart fairly clean, it's not a terribly long job."

"We're going to the cafe. You guys comin'?" Jesse called from the shop door, interrupting before Vince could speculate on the realism of Tempest thinking she could have the car back on the road in three hours.

"Yeah, we're coming," Vince called back.

Together they headed for the car, and both were surprised when she got into the Maxima without complaint or protest. They pulled up to the front of the little store, Letty and Tempest ending up side by side due to the parking choices of Vince and Letty. They walked into the little cafe together, Dom and Vince walking behind them.

"Hey guys," Mia said from behind the counter. "Lunch time already?"

"Yeah, days half over and the works only a quarter done," Dom answered on a sigh. "Means less time for getting our own vehicles ready for tonight."

"I'm sure it'll be fine," Mia reassured. "What do you all want to eat?"

Vince spoke up before anyone else could get a word in. "Cheeseburger and fries." He looked around for Tempest, found her at the cold drink display with Letty at the back of the room. "Temp what're you eating?"

"Ham sandwich, no crust, brown bread," she called back.

Vince looked at Mia. "You get that?"

One side of Mia's nose rose in a sneer of sarcasm. "I'm not stupid."

Dom saw Vince's mouth go to open with what he was sure would be a smart ass retort. "Think twice," he warned his friend.

Vince's mouth stayed shut, but mutiny flashed in his eyes. Clearly he wasn't happy about being stifled. Dom turned back to Mia. "Burger and fries please. Letty?!" he bellowed at his girlfriend. "Food!"

"Burger, fries," Letty roared back.

Mia rolled her eyes before putting five burgers on the little grill to cook and dropping a basket of fries to turn golden before taking two pieces of brown bread out of the bag. She knew without asking that Jesse and Leon wanted the same as everyone but Tempest. "Do you want anything on your sandwich?" Mia asked as Tempest sat down on the stool beside Vince.

"Butter, mustard and mayo," Tempest answered.

"Kinda defeats the point of brown bread and going all healthy with the sandwich if you're going to have butter and mayo doesn't it?"

Tempest looked at Vince. "This from someone who's having deep fried potato and grease dripping hamburger meat for the second day in a row?"

Vince shrugged. "Not like it's hurting my girlish figure is it?" He flexed his arm to show off a rather impressive bicep.

"And are you saying that I need to watch mine?"

"I know I'm stupid, but I ain't that stupid." Vince tapped his temple with a forefinger.

"Debatable," Letty answered, grinning.

Before anyone else could join the fray, Mia started setting plates in front of them all.

They left her what seemed like mere minutes later, leaving a wake of dirty dishes and decimated food in their wake. Then it was back to being hard at work in the shop. There was only two hours until their deadline to stop doing customer work and switch onto prepping their own vehicles for the night to come.