The car went back to the shop today, the same air conditioning that failed once before and was returned to me under a two-year warranty, only to quit again almost at once. This time the verdict was a bad resistor, replaced with Subaru parts; the dial that had given me nothing between Off and full blast now moves through its settings as it should. Whether it holds is another matter, and I have learned not to trust a repair until a season has tested it. Rather than call for a ride home, I made a day of it, working through bugs at the coffee shop while the mechanics worked through mine, and closed the afternoon with two beers well earned. A day handed over to waiting, spent instead on something like contentment.