For his father's car, he had changed his mind on the Tube to Fulham.
He had considered an Aston Martin. The gesture of it was appealing — the most prestigious available, the car that announced itself. But he thought about his father, and about what his father actually loved, and realised he had been thinking about the gesture rather than the person.
Arthur Weasley encountered Muggle engineering with the wonder of someone who found it genuinely beautiful — beautiful the way solutions were beautiful when constraints produced invention. He had a shed full of things he had taken apart and put back together and loved. He didn't need the most prestigious car. He needed the car he had already noticed.
Ron had found it in a motoring supplement his father had left folded to a specific page on the kitchen counter in June. Not circled, not annotated. Just left where someone might see it, in the specific way his father left things he wanted without knowing how to want them.
A Jaguar XJ6. 1990 priced around 9000 pounds or 450 galleons . Dark green exterior, cream leather interior.
The Fulham dealership was not a prestige address, but the car was there. The salesman was direct, the service history was complete, and the previous owner had been, he was told, a retired surgeon in Hampshire who had kept it garaged.
His father would enchant it within the first month. He would make the engine run on something that wasn't petrol. He would almost certainly enchant it to fly, which he would consider a reasonable modification. He would keep it in better conditions than the shed deserved and would show it to anyone who asked with the enthusiasm of someone given the most interesting possible thing to work with.
'Yes,' Ron said. 'I'll take it.'
He got back to the Burrow at half past six.
His mother was in the kitchen doorway before he cleared the gate. She looked at him, and then at the two sets of keys he set on the kitchen table, and the expression became something else entirely.
His father came in from the garden with his boots still on — which his mother noticed and did not address in the current moment, which indicated the level of her interest in what was on the table.
Arthur Weasley picked up the Jaguar key. He turned it over. He looked at the badge on the fob with the expression he gave objects entirely outside his ordinary frame of reference that were, therefore, extraordinarily interesting.
'Ron,' he said.
'For when Black's opens,' Ron said. 'Sirius has the space. The club is for later. But this one's for now — for the shed, for the work.' He paused. 'It needs someone who'll appreciate it.'
His father held the key with both hands the way he held the things he loved best. He looked at the badge. Then at Ron. The expression was the one he had for things he had not expected to have.
'What kind?' he said.
'Jaguar XJ6. 1990. The previous owner kept it properly.'
His father set the key down and picked it up again.
His mother was watching both of them with her arms folded, her expression doing several things at once. She looked at the second key.
'And the other?' she said.
'Mine,' he said. 'A Porsche. For the same reasons.'
She looked at him with the expression that was not quite criticism and not quite approval and was entirely her.
'Ron,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
She looked at the two keys on the kitchen table, and at her son who was fourteen years old and had spent the day buying cars in Muggle London using an aging potion and was entirely calm about it, and she picked up her wooden spoon and went back to the stove.
'Dinner in ten minutes,' she said. 'Wash your hands.'
He went.
He had left the parcel on the kitchen table that night after everyone else had gone to sleep. No note. She found it when she came in from checking the garden, still in her apron, and stood looking at it for a moment before she picked it up.
She unwrapped it without hurrying. The amber caught the morning light through the window and held it --- that particular warm gold, the colour of a kitchen in the afternoon when everything in it is known and accounted for. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at him, with the expression she had in the March photograph, and did not say anything, which was, for his mother, the precise equivalent of saying everything.
She put it on.
She wore it to breakfast, and to the shopping, and Ron saw it again at dinner against her collar, the amber still catching light, and said nothing about it, which was the correct response, and which she received in the way she received things that were given in the right spirit: without making them more than they were, or less.