Story code: ST-000896
Part 2: Every Favor Came With My Name On It
After the camera snapped level, Derek lowered both hands like maybe nobody had noticed what he’d just done. The drone sat in my grass with one bent arm and that crooked little lens, but the chirp had been sharp and deliberate, not random, and Tessa was still looking at his controller instead of at me.
I pointed at the drone. “I thought you didn’t know how to recover it.”
He answered too fast. “I don’t, not really. That was just a reset. I watched a video.”
“Then use the side gate and get it,” I said.
He shook his head once. “I don’t want to do the wrong thing if the motors are locked. Can you just slide a rake under it so it doesn’t scrape?”
There it was again. Another tiny favor. Another way to get my hands or my tools involved.
My rake was leaning beside the shed. He’d seen it before because he looked straight at it when he said it.
“No,” I said.
He tried a different angle. “Mara, come on. If it sits there and the battery swells, that’s dangerous in your yard too.”
“Then come remove your dangerous thing from my yard.”
Tessa came a little farther onto their patio, not close enough to take over anything, just close enough that Derek had an audience from his own side. “Did you just say you knew how to reset it?”
He kept his face toward the fence. “I said I watched one video.”
“You also said you were too new to recover it,” I said. “So which part are you too new for?”
He gave a short laugh that landed flat. “Flying. Crashes. All of it. I’m not some expert. That’s why I’m asking for a little help instead of making it worse.”
I bent to pick up the loose fence board before it warped any further in the sun. The board slipped against the post because I only had one glove on, and I had to set it back down against the bucket. That, more than anything, showed what he had managed to do. My simple repair had gone from a steady, boring job to a standstill because he had dropped a broken drone into the middle of it and turned it into a fence-line argument about who touched what.
He saw me move the board and jumped on it.
“Please don’t start working around it,” he said. “If debris gets kicked up and hits the camera, that’s not on me.”
I straightened and stared at him through the slats. “You crashed it here.”
“And I’m trying to resolve it carefully.”
“By asking me to do each part for you.”
He didn’t deny that. He just shifted his weight and looked back down at the controller. His thumbs hovered over the sticks, then moved away. Hovered again. That stop-start rhythm was stranger than the words.
I walked to the side gate and unlatched it. The hinges clicked. “Gate’s open,” I said. “Come get your drone.”
He stayed where he was.
“I don’t want to walk in there if it’s still powered and jumps,” he said.
“You just reset it from there.”
“That doesn’t mean I know how to pick it up after a crash.”
Tessa folded her arms. “Then power it off.”
He didn’t look at her. “It’s not always that simple.”
I held the gate open and waited. He stayed planted on his side of the fence, still talking, still not moving toward the opening that solved the whole problem.
“Maybe put a bucket over it,” he said. “Just until I can figure out what the app is saying.”
I let the gate swing shut on its own. “No.”
He blew out a breath and finally walked the length of the fence toward the gate area, but even then he stopped outside it instead of coming through. He looked from me to the drone to the controller in his hand.
“If I do this,” he said, “don’t go near it.”
I stepped back until I was beside my patio table. “I wasn’t near it before.”
Tessa had come down off their patio by then and was standing in their grass where she could see through the open space by the gate. Nobody said anything for a few seconds.
Derek held the controller up, then lowered it. He tapped his phone. The drone made another short chirp.
“See? That’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “I don’t know what mode it’s in.”
But his eyes stayed on the machine with the kind of fixed attention you see when someone is waiting for a response they expect.
One prop twitched.
Just once. A small, precise kick.
Then another.
The drone didn’t lift, but it pivoted a few inches in the grass, turning its broken front arm away from the fence as neatly as a hand repositioning a dropped glass before picking it up.
I looked at Derek. He was already nudging the left stick with the edge of his thumb, gentle and exact.
Tessa said, very clearly, “I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that.”
He stopped moving his thumb, but he didn’t take it off the controller.
The drone gave one more obedient little turn in my yard, and the man who said he was too new to handle it had just lined it up for recovery without stepping through the gate once.