By nine the heat had settled into the sheet metal. Ray Kostecki walked along the first row of cars with his coffee mug in one hand and laid the other on a roof here and there. The roofs were already warm. The yard was closed on Sundays. It said so on the sign on the gate and had said so for forty years, but Ray lived in the room behind the office and was there anyway, and everybody who needed to know that knew it.

His father had started the yard in the spring of 1984 on a lot nobody else wanted, between the tracks and the last of the houses, with a tow truck, a welder, and his share of a severance that never came to what the union had promised. The first year they had mostly taken in the things people in Fontana couldn't afford to fix anymore. Now the yard held three hundred cars on five or six acres, and Ray could find his way through the rows blind.

The green 2004 Camry had given up its alternator in July and its left taillight in August, but the transmission was still in it, and that was worth a hundred and fifty dollars to anyone who knew what to ask for. The Silverado next to it had been stripped of almost everything but the seats, and nobody was going to want the seats. A 1998 Buick LeSabre had come in on Thursday with under thirty thousand miles on the odometer, a claim ticket from a dry cleaner in Redlands in the glove box, and half a roll of cough drops in the cup holder. He hadn't decided what it would be yet. He liked that, the days before he'd decided.

Against the fence leaned a wheel someone had dropped off on Friday. He rapped it with his key ring in passing and could hear from the ring of it that it was cast and not forged, and that there was a crack in it somewhere nobody had seen. He had learned that from his father, who could hear the difference between two kinds of steel through a wall. The wheel would go for scrap, and there was nothing to be sorry about in that.

Daisy walked a few steps behind him with her head low. She was a pit bull mix with a gray muzzle and a hip that acted up in the cold, which there wasn't much of. She had come in with an Oldsmobile twelve years ago, a puppy in a cardboard box on the back seat, and on the box someone had written DAISY in marker. Ray had kept both the car and the dog. She ate a senior formula that cost more per pound than his own meat, and the vet in Colton was the only person Ray paid without haggling.

At the very back, along the sheet-metal fence and the railroad embankment, was a row he never sold from. He walked past it without slowing down.

By the scale stood the soda machine, which ate every third coin. Ray fed it anyway, with change from the coffee can on the shelf inside the office door, and when it swallowed the third one without giving anything back, he hit it once with the flat of his hand on the side, where the paint was worn, and got a Dr Pepper out. That one he counted as free.

Carl Obregón came a little after ten. The regulars knew Ray was there on Sundays and that the gate would open if you hollered. Carl was going gray in the mustache, did HVAC work in Riverside, and had spent six years restoring a 1956 Ford F-100, the same model year as the truck under the tarp in Ray's shop. He was looking for a grille. Ray had seen his truck once, on a trailer outside the gate, and had sized it up in a few seconds: good metal, wrong color, too much money already sunk into it to ever come back out, and the man who owned a truck like that was the best kind of customer.

"I've been looking online," Carl said as they walked. "People want four hundred for a rusty one."

"People want a lot of things."

They went through the rows, and Ray showed him a bumper that would fit with a little work and a pair of door handles that were better than Carl's own. Carl got happier with every part he found. He talked to the cars about what he was going to do with them, and Ray let him, because men like that bought more than they came for.

In the back row, the one Ray never sold from, Carl stopped. Between a rusted-out Studebaker and a Ford Falcon with no wheels stood another '56, and the grille was still on it, whole, the chrome gone dull but without a single dent.

"Well, would you look at that," Carl said.

Ray looked. He knew it had been standing there since 1991.

"What do you want for it?"

Ray never said no. That was a rule from his father, who had said that a man who says no in a junkyard hasn't understood what business he's in. Ray drank from his soda can and let it take a while. Then he named a price in the same voice he used for every other price, calm and matter-of-fact, as if it were the market's and not his.

"Twelve hundred."

Carl laughed first, thinking it was a joke. Then he understood that it wasn't and went red in the face.

"Twelve hundred for a grille? I can get a new repro for half that."

"You can."

"I'm not coming back here, Ray."

He walked to the gate with the door handles under his arm, which he had already paid for. Ray let him go. The grille could stay where it was, and nobody could say it wasn't for sale.

Daisy had lain down in the shade under the Falcon. Ray had to call her twice before she came.

The young man came at noon and pressed the bell at the gate, which hadn't worked since spring. Ray heard the engine before he saw the truck: a V8 with a lifter that ticked a little too much at idle, and an exhaust with a crack somewhere past the catalytic converter. He knew which truck it was before he was out of the office.

It was a 1979 Chevrolet C10, two-tone brown and beige, with an aluminum toolbox across the bed. A name had been punched into the lid with letter stamps, one letter at a time and a little crooked: W. DUBRAY.

Walt Dubray had bought parts at the yard for thirty years. Ray had sold him the alternator that was in the truck, pulled from a 1994 Blazer, and the left side mirror, and once a whole rear axle that they had swapped together in the yard on a Saturday in August, back when Walt could still get under a car. He hadn't seen Walt in over a year.

The grandson was maybe twenty-five, in a pair of khakis that were too warm for the day. He had his grandfather's wide forehead but not his hands.

"Heard you do cash on Sundays."

"Sometimes."

"It was my grandpa's. He died in July." The young man looked at the truck and not at Ray. "My mom wants it out of the driveway before the house sells."

Ray said he was sorry, and in his way he meant it.

"Did you know him?" the grandson asked.

"He bought parts here now and then."

That was all he said about it. He could have said more, about the Saturday with the axle and about how Walt always brought two coffees from 7-Eleven and set one on Ray's workbench without asking if he wanted it, but he didn't know how you said things like that to somebody you didn't know, and even less to somebody you were about to do business with. So he walked around the truck at his own pace.

The engine was sound, and the lifter was a twenty-minute adjustment. The bed had no rust, because Walt had kept a cover on it all those years. Walt's toolbox was full. When he lifted the lid he saw SAE sockets in a roll of waxed canvas, Walt's old combination wrenches, worn shiny by the same hand over fifty years, and a torque wrench that by itself was worth more than he meant to pay for the whole truck.

He didn't say anything about recognizing the truck. What he said was that the exhaust needed replacing, that the tires were old, that the brakes had probably been let go, and that a truck from the seventies wasn't worth much to anybody but collectors, and collectors wanted them in better shape than this. All of it was true, more or less.

While he talked, the young man had opened the passenger door and taken something out of the glove box: a pair of reading glasses in a brown case and a pack of gum. For a while he held them without knowing what to do with them. He put the gum back. The glasses went in his shirt pocket. Ray saw it and valued the glasses at zero, but he had to add it up twice before he got there.

"I was thinking fifteen hundred," the young man said.

"Six hundred."

The grandson looked at him for the first time. He had Walt's pale eyes, and they weren't hard.

"Rent's due Wednesday."

Ray heard that. He added Wednesday and the rent to what he already knew and didn't raise his offer. He had sold parts for this truck for thirty years, an alternator here and an axle there, and now it was coming back to his yard with everything in it.

They settled on eight hundred. Ray went into the office and counted the bills out of the safe, and when the young man asked what he should do about the toolbox, Ray said it could go with the truck, since it was bolted on. They wrote up the bill of sale on the office desk, on the back of a calendar page from a tire company in San Bernardino.

Before the grandson left, he stood for a while by the bed and ran his thumb over the letters in the lid, W. DUBRAY, as if checking that they were still there. Then he called for a ride and waited outside the gate in the sun, and when the car came he left without looking back.

Afterward Ray stood for a while with his hand on the Chevy's hood. The feeling came the way it usually did after a good deal, warm and solid, somewhere between his chest and his stomach, and he held on to it as long as he could. It was gone before he had backed the truck in between the Silverado and the Buick.

He unbolted the toolbox and carried it into the office. He put it under the desk, where he could rest his feet on it.

Around three he went back out to the Chevy, because the lifter was bothering him. He propped the hood and pulled the valve cover, and adjusting the lifter with a feeler gauge out of Walt's own toolbox took twenty minutes, as he had known it would. When he started the engine it ran smooth, with the deep, slightly rocking idle a seventies V8 is supposed to have, and he listened to it longer than he needed to.

He could sell it for three thousand to somebody who wanted a work truck with soul, or part it out and get four thousand for the pieces. He shut off the engine and knew that neither was going to happen.

By four it was too hot to be out in the rows, and he went into the shop, where a ceiling fan turned the hot air around without cooling anything. Under a tarp in the back bay, his father's 1956 F-100 was waiting.

He had started on it the year after his father died, and that was nineteen years ago now. His father had bought it used in 1962, when he was new at the mill, and driven it to work every day until the fenders rusted through. After the shutdown it had sat here, among the first cars in the yard, and his father had never wanted it fixed. He said it ran fine the way it was, though it didn't run at all.

The engine and the cab were done. What was left was the kind of thing nobody else would ever notice, like the gap between the hood and the left front fender, a thirty-second of an inch wider than on the right side. He had straightened the fender three times and repainted it twice. Today he loosened the bolts again.

His fingers did what they usually did these days. They went numb first, at the tips, and then they ached in the joints in a way the doctor in Rialto had called arthritis and Ray called weather, though there wasn't any weather to speak of. The third bolt slipped out of his hand and bounced down into the gravel by the wall, where forty years of other scrap metal lay.

It cost thirty cents. He looked for it for an hour, on his knees, with a flashlight and a magnet on a telescoping rod, while Daisy lay in the doorway and followed him with her eyes. In the end he found it under an old drain pan, and when he got up his shirt was stuck to his back and his knees had something to say about it. He put it back in and left the others loose. The gap could stay a thirty-second too wide one more Sunday.

In the office his father's hard hat had its place on the shelf above the safe, gray and scratched, with a faded decal you could still read: KAISER STEEL – FONTANA. His father had worn it for twenty-two years, until December 1983, when the mill shut down and Ray was nineteen. Afterward parts of the mill had been taken apart, packed in crates, and shipped to China, where somebody had put it back together. For a long time Ray had thought it was the only deal made in Fontana that year that was done right.

He waited until dark before he went out with the flyers. They were in a stack of fifty in his back pocket, yellow and printed at the same print shop for twenty years: WE BUY CARS – CASH – WE PICK UP, and under that the yard's number. Daisy went on a leash she didn't need, because dogs off leash made people nervous, and nervous people didn't sell cars.

The asphalt was giving off heat as he went out through the gate. From one of the houses came a baseball game on the radio, and farther off, by the tracks, a freight train was heading east so slowly it took several minutes for the last car to pass. Daisy stopped and watched it go, as she always did, and Ray let her finish watching.

The houses on the other side of the gate were low fifties houses, and the blocks ran a few streets north, up toward the care home behind the gas station. The route took an hour at Daisy's pace. He kept track of which cars in the neighborhood weren't moving and for how long. The white Corolla on Randall Avenue hadn't moved since Easter, but the tires had been aired up in August, so somebody still cared. The van outside number 412 had been moved over the weekend, and the old El Camino with the cracked windshield was on the same spot as before.

On Pepper Avenue lived the man who washed his Mustang every Sunday morning and never drove it. He was past eighty and had started steadying himself on the hood when he bent down for the bucket. Ray nodded to him when they passed and had figured out that the car would come to the yard within five years, six if the man had kids who cared. He thought about it without any malice. People and cars got old at different speeds, and whoever was left last got to decide.

At every mailbox he slipped in a flyer. It was against the law to put unstamped advertising in mailboxes, and he had been doing it since the nineties without anybody caring. Daisy stopped when he stopped and sniffed the posts while she waited, and that was how they went, box by box, through the grid of streets.

The blue Taurus had been on his list all summer. It was a 1997, the oval kind that people had laughed at when it was new and that nobody made anymore. He had seen the lady who owned it for years, a small woman with both hands on the wheel who drove to Albertsons on Tuesdays and kept to the speed limit. The car had been garaged at night, serviced on time, and surely had under a hundred thousand miles on it. An old lady's car is the best used car there is, his father used to say, and it was still true.

Since February it had been sitting out in the driveway. He had watched the dust settle on the windshield and the left front tire go down a little at a time.

Three times he had pushed a flyer through the mail slot in the door. Nobody had called.

Tonight there was a light on in the house. He saw it all the way from the corner at Pepper, and he slowed down without thinking about it. There hadn't been a light on there since winter.

Half a block away he heard the engine start on the first try, a three-liter with the dry, slightly rattly idle that model had, and he recognized it the way you recognize a voice in another room. He stood on the sidewalk and listened. It ran even. Somebody had kept it up.

Daisy pulled on the leash toward the next mailbox, and he let her pull him there, and to the next one. He had already made up his mind where he was going.

By the time he got to the driveway the engine had been shut off. It ticked as it cooled. The light from the living room window fell across half the driveway, and in it he could see someone sitting in the driver's seat. He saw a shoulder and a hand on the wheel but no face.

He stopped at the curb with the flyer in his hand, behind a white Honda he didn't recognize. It was a few years old and well kept, with a parking sticker from an office in Ontario in the corner of the windshield. From here he could see the things he knew about: the dust on the windshield, the tire that had gone down, the paint faded to gray on the roof. He could also see something he hadn't seen before. From the rearview mirror hung something red and round that turned slowly in the light from the window. He couldn't make out what it was.

To leave the flyer he would have had to walk up the driveway, past the car, past her, and put it through the mail slot while she sat there and watched him do it. He could tell you to the dollar what the car was worth. What you said to a woman sitting in the dark in a car that hadn't moved in seven months, he didn't know.

It wasn't his business, and the car wasn't going anywhere.

Daisy waited by his leg. He put the flyer back in the stack and went on down the street, and at the corner he turned without looking back. It was the only house on the street that didn't get a flyer that night.

Back in the office he sat down at the desk with his feet on Walt's toolbox and took out the notebook. It was the fourth one so far, and in it he kept track of the cars he was waiting for, with address and model and what he had seen change since last time, and some of the lines had been there for years.

He paged back before he wrote. Buick Century, green, Cedar Ave, it said on a page from 2019, and under that three dates and three prices, each lower than the one before, and last a fourth date two years later with the word picked up. He had paid less than he first wrote down. It usually worked out that way, if you just waited.

He wrote the address, Ford Taurus 1997, blue, and the date. Light in house. Someone in car. White Honda on street. Under that he wrote a price he was willing to pay. He looked at it for a while, drew a straight line through it, and wrote a lower one.

Daisy was asleep in her spot by the door, and out in the yard Walt's Chevy stood between the Silverado and the Buick. Ray sat with the pen in his hand and read the page through once more before he turned off the lamp.