Chapter 10 – The Garage He Kept

Jack maintained his connection to his uncle’s garage even after his career at Kane Aerospace fully established itself, returning on weekends when his schedule allowed, insisting the hands-on mechanical work remained genuinely valuable to the more theoretical engineering he now practiced professionally.

“You don’t have to keep doing this,” his uncle told him once, watching Jack work beneath a pickup truck with the same careful attention he’d always brought to the garage, despite his now considerably more prestigious career elsewhere. “You’ve made it. Real engineering job, real recognition. Nobody would blame you for leaving the garage work behind entirely.”

“I don’t want to leave it behind,” Jack said. “This is where the actual thinking happens, for me. The theory’s important, but I catch things here, with my hands actually on the engine, that I’d never catch just staring at a screen. I think that’s exactly what Willow saw in the original forum posts, honestly — theory and practice, both together.”

Willow, visiting the garage occasionally herself by then, had come to genuinely appreciate exactly the dynamic Jack described, several of Kane Aerospace’s more successful recent innovations tracing back, in some fashion, to insights Jack had developed during exactly this kind of hands-on weekend work.

His family, once dismissive of the garage as a waste of his education, had come to understand it, finally, as something closer to the actual foundation of everything Jack had eventually built — not despite the years spent under cars in Marfa, but genuinely, meaningfully, because of them.

“Turns out it wasn’t a waste after all,” Jack told his mother once, only half-joking, watching her genuine pride in a career she’d once dismissed entirely. “Just took the rest of the world a little while to catch up to what the garage was actually teaching me.”