My name is Lydia Brandt.
On paper, I’ve been Lydia Whitaker for three years. Since the day I married Ethan. But I want to tell you who I was before that. Because for three years, I’d been mostly a pair of hands in a blue truck, and I think I’d almost forgotten.
I’m thirty-six years old. My father, George Brandt, ran Brandt Auto & Diesel on Route 9 for forty-one years.
Two service bays. A gravel lot. A hand-painted sign he lettered himself in 1983, with a little red wrench in the corner.
He fixed school buses for the county. Delivery vans for the bakery in town. Ambulances for the volunteer fire company. Dump trucks for the highway department. And on slow days, the neighbors’ lawn mowers and snowblowers, for free.
“Somebody’s got to,” he used to say.
My mother died of an aneurysm when I was eleven. She was standing at the stove making pancakes on a Sunday morning, and then she was on the floor. After that, it was just the two of us. And the shop.
I did my homework at the end of his workbench. I learned to change oil before I learned to drive. I could name every wrench on his pegboard by the time I was twelve.
When I was fifteen, he sat me down at the kitchen table with a shoebox full of receipts and a ledger book.
“You’re good with numbers,” he said. “Better than me. I need somebody to do the books.”
So I did the books. Every week. For twenty years.
By the time I was twenty-five, I understood depreciation schedules, equipment liens, quarterly estimated taxes, and how to read a commercial property tax assessment better than most of the accountants in our county. I got my bookkeeping certification at the community college at night. Later, I started doing the books for half the small businesses on Route 9. The diner. The feed store. The florist. The veterinarian.
Dad used to tap the ledger with his thick finger and say, “Numbers don’t lie, Lydia. People do. So watch the numbers.”
I thought it was just one of those things fathers say.
It turned out to be the most important thing anyone ever taught me.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.