Daria's day

Karel rolled the bakkie off the lift at seven with the secondhand differential housing whining on the first turn of the key. She paid the remaining four thousand in cash from the Bo-Kaap envelope, signed his worksheet in her own blood from a paper cut, and rode out with Willem — Karel's twenty-one-year-old apprentice — to test the new housing on the steep gravel out of town. When she downshifted into second gear his hand landed on her bare thigh for a second and stayed there until she shifted it off without looking at him. When they got back to the yard he lingered in the office doorframe and said something about her staying for a beer that was not, in the way he said it, about beer. She turned the rig onto the N7 toward the bigger Hendrik order with a thermos of coffee and a body not yet ready for the Cederberg, and Tertius Joubert's rival Clanwilliam rig clocked her plates across the road at the Caltex.