Avery Collins had been told three different things by three different mechanics, and she had paid every one of them to tell her.
The first shop said it was the transmission. Thirty-eight hundred dollars.
The second shop said it was the rear end. Twenty-six hundred, maybe more once they got in there.
The third shop, a chain place in Athens with a big yellow sign, said they couldn't find anything wrong at all. They charged her a hundred and fifty dollars for the diagnostic and told her it was safe to drive.
"So which one is it?" Avery asked, standing in Hank Doyle's garage with her hands jammed in her jacket pockets.
"Don't know yet," Hank said. "Haven't heard it."
Avery was twenty, a second-year nursing student at Ohio University. She drove forty miles each way on Route 33, four days a week, for classes and her hospital shifts. She was wearing scrubs under her jacket. She looked like she hadn't slept since August.
The truck was a 2006 Ford Ranger, dark green, with a toolbox in the bed and a faded Steelers sticker on the back window. It had belonged to her grandfather, Roy Tackett. He'd passed in the spring.
Hank had known Roy a little, back in the trucking days. Not well. Well enough that when Roy's granddaughter called his house because "Grandpa always said if you can't figure out a truck, find Hank Doyle," Hank told her to come right over.
"If it's the transmission," Avery said, "I can't afford it. I'll have to sell the truck. And if I sell the truck, I can't get to school. So." She shrugged like it didn't matter. It obviously did. "I'll take a semester off. Work. Figure it out."
"Let's go for a ride first," Hank said.
He drove. Avery sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed.
Hank didn't turn on the radio. He didn't talk. He drove out of Pine Hollow on the county road with the windows rolled down a crack, and he listened.
At twenty miles an hour, nothing.
At thirty, there it was. A faint tick. Under the truck, in the middle.
*Tick. Tick. Tick.*
He sped up. The ticking sped up with him.
He pushed in the clutch and let the engine drop to idle while the truck coasted. The engine went quiet. The ticking didn't. It kept right on going, keeping time with the wheels.
Hank's face didn't change. But his hands moved a little on the wheel.
"That's not your transmission," he said.
"How do you know?"
"Because the engine's not doing anything right now, and the transmission's in neutral. The noise is coming from something that turns with the wheels. Not with the motor."
He pulled off on the gravel shoulder and shut it down, very gently. Then he got out and lay down on his back in the gravel, in his good jacket, and slid under the truck with a flashlight.
Avery stood by the tailgate and waited.
He was under there a long time. When he came back out, his face was a different color.
"Avery," he said. "How far did you drive today?"
"Forty miles. From Athens. Route 33."
"How fast?"
"I don't know. Sixty-five? Seventy?" She frowned. "Why?"
Hank took out his phone and called Lorraine.
"Honey, bring the trailer," he said. "Lutz Hollow Road, by the bridge." He hung up and looked at Avery.
"This truck's not going another foot," he said. "Not on its own wheels."
"But the shop said it was safe to drive."
"I know what they said." Hank wiped his hands on a rag, slowly, the way he did when he was trying not to say something. "They were wrong."
He pointed under the truck, at the long steel driveshaft that ran from the transmission to the back wheels.
"If that lets go at seventy on Route 33," Hank said, "the front end of that shaft drops and digs into the road. At highway speed, with a truck this light..."
He didn't finish the sentence.
He didn't have to.