Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 5: Nietzsche and Leftover Pie
The lunch she brought him on Wednesday was an accident.
That was what Maya told herself, anyway. She’d been pulling an extra shift and there had been leftover pie — the peach kind that Donna made from scratch on Tuesdays and that was always gone by noon — and two plate-fulls of the Wednesday special that the cook had made too much of, and it would have been wasteful not to box them up.
She told herself this firmly, twice, on the walk from the Rusty Spoke to Cross Moto, a to-go bag in each hand.
The shop was quieter than it had been on Monday. Decker wasn’t there, or if he was, he was somewhere she couldn’t see him. The bay where her Civic lived was half-lit and music was coming from a small Bluetooth speaker on the workbench — something low and instrumental, the kind of thing you wouldn’t expect from a man who looked like Jackson Cross. She’d have guessed he’d listen to something harder.
He was under the car on a creeper when she came in, just his legs visible and the occasional metallic sound that suggested progress. She stopped a few feet away, because she’d learned not to startle him, and said, “I brought food.”
The sounds stopped. Then the creeper rolled out and Jackson blinked up at her from the floor, a wrench in one hand and a slight crease between his brows.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“Donna made too much pie. It would have gone to waste.”
He looked at the bags. Back at her. “Where’s Emma?”
“Mrs. Peralta’s. I have until three.” She held up the bags slightly, feeling inexplicably awkward about this. “It’s just the special and some pie. You don’t have to eat it now if you’re in the middle of —”
He sat up, set down the wrench, and stood in one motion, and took the bags from her with the ease of someone accepting something that made sense.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
There was nowhere particularly clean to eat in a mechanic’s bay, but Jackson pulled a stool from the corner and set the food on the workbench, and Maya hoisted herself up on the edge of the bench — which was clean, she noticed, methodically so — and that was how they ended up eating the Wednesday special side by side among the tools, with the instrumental music playing and the afternoon heat pressing against the metal walls.
He ate like someone who forgot about meals when he was working and then, when reminded, discovered he was starving. The efficiency of it was almost charming.
“How’s it looking?” she asked, nodding toward the Civic.
“Good. Better than I expected, actually. Water pump’s in. Working on the coolant line now.” He ate another forkful. “I’ll test the gasket seal tomorrow. Should be solid by Friday.”
“You said that on Monday.”
“I was right on Monday.”
She looked at him sideways. “You’re very sure of yourself.”
“About cars, yes.” He said it without any ego in it, just assessment. “I’ve been doing this since I was sixteen.”
“At a shop?”
“No.” A brief pause, just long enough that she noticed it. “On my own. You figure things out when there’s no one to show you.”
She didn’t ask. She’d learned not to ask about the things people paused over — she’d been on the other side of that enough times, felt people pulling at the edges of things she’d sealed shut, and she understood the value of leaving closed doors closed.
But he looked at her sideways, and there was something in his expression that suggested he’d noticed the not-asking, and considered it.
“Foster system,” he said, casual enough that it didn’t quite feel like an offering but was. “Aged out at eighteen. You pick up useful things when you’re on your own.”
Maya was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it in the simple way, not the performative one.
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” He turned back to his food. “I’ve got the MC now. That’s more family than most people get.”
She absorbed that. Turned her fork over in her hand. “I didn’t know motorcycle clubs were — I mean, I assumed — ”
“Criminals.” He said it without offense. “Most people do.”
“Are they wrong?”
He considered this with what she was starting to recognize as his characteristic thoughtfulness — he didn’t answer questions reflexively, he actually processed them, which was rarer than it should have been. “Some clubs, yes. We’re not. We’ve got guys who work trades, run businesses. We do security sometimes, community stuff. It’s a brotherhood. A complicated one, but —” he shrugged. “Most families are.”
She thought about that. “Do you have — ” she started, and stopped.
“What?”
“Do you have a regular family? Like, parents, siblings —”
“No.” Again, no weight to it, just fact. “You?”
“My mother’s in Tucson. We don’t — it’s complicated.” She put her fork down. “My dad died when I was twelve.”
He looked at her. He didn’t say I’m sorry in the rote way — he just looked at her for a moment with something that felt like acknowledgment, which was different and better.
She picked up the pie. Handed him the other container.
“Peach,” she said.
He took it. They were quiet for a moment, eating pie in a mechanic’s bay while the music played, and it was the most comfortable Maya had felt in the company of another person in longer than she could easily calculate.
“What are you reading?” he asked, nodding at the book she’d tucked under her arm when she came in — her copy of the novel she’d been attempting all week.
“Nothing, mostly. I can’t focus lately.” She turned it over in her hands. “What about you? Do you read?”
He got up and crossed to the workbench on the far wall, opened a drawer, and came back with a paperback that had been worked over to within an inch of its life — spine cracked, pages bent, cover held together with a rubber band. He handed it to her.
She looked at it. Read the cover twice.
“Nietzsche?” She looked up at him. “You’re reading Nietzsche.”
“Re-reading.” He took it back and set it on the bench, unbothered by her expression. “It’s not what people think it is. Most people hear the name and picture something they got wrong in a freshman philosophy class.”
“I’m not — I’m not judging, I just —” She laughed, which surprised her. It came out genuine and a little startled, the way real laughs did. “You’re under a car listening to jazz and reading Nietzsche.”
“Coltrane,” he said. “Not jazz in general. And what were you expecting?”
“I don’t know.” She was still smiling, and she felt it on her face and let it stay. “Something louder.”
“I save the loud for the road.” He picked up his fork again. “The shop is where I think.”
She looked at him — at the worn paperback on the bench, at the careful organization of the tools on the wall, at the way he’d cleared a clean space on the workbench for their lunch without seeming to think about it — and she felt that loosening again, the one she’d felt watching him with Emma. Like something she’d been holding at a specific tension was being, very gradually, let out.
“What does he say?” she asked. “Nietzsche. What’s the part that makes you keep coming back to it?”
He was quiet for a moment, thinking about it genuinely. “He writes about the will to live as something you construct, not something you’re given. The idea that meaning isn’t built into things — you have to make it. Most people find that depressing.” He set down his fork. “I find it freeing.”
Maya looked at him.
“Because if meaning isn’t given,” she said slowly, “then it can’t be taken.”
He looked at her with something new in his expression. Not surprise, exactly. More like recognition.
“Yeah,” he said. “Exactly like that.”
They sat with that for a moment, in the warm shop, with Coltrane playing softly and the desert light going gold outside the open bay door. And Maya thought about two years of rebuilding something from nothing, of choosing every day to make it mean something, of Emma asleep in her lap in a plastic chair with absolute trust in her mother’s presence.
She thought about meaning you construct yourself, and how much of her life she’d spent doing exactly that without having the words for it.
She slid off the workbench. “I should get back.”
“Thank you for the food.”
“It was going to waste,” she said, which was still technically true and which they both knew was only technically true.
He didn’t call her on it. He just nodded, picked up the Nietzsche, and walked her to the bay door.
“Friday,” he said. “End of day. She’ll be ready.”
“I’ll be here,” she said.
She walked back to the Rusty Spoke in the afternoon heat and thought about meaning you build yourself, and a man who listened to Coltrane and read philosophy and fixed her car for the cost of parts and didn’t ask for anything back.
She didn’t know what to do with him. She knew she was going to keep coming back to it, turning it over, the way she turned over good sentences when she found them.
She was almost at the diner door when she realized she was still smiling.
She didn’t make herself stop.
Reader Reactions