"I heard you," Carrie said. "We'll eat it anyway. Frank always said a pie's not the crust. It's who sits down."
Chapter 10: The Estimate
Paul Osei had run the machine shop on East Line Street for nineteen years, with a valley-wide reputation for two things: he never hurried a diagnosis, and he never once padded a bill. When the club trailer brought the Electra Glide in on Monday, Paul walked around it three times before touching anything, like a doctor around a bed.
Carrie stood in the shop doorway, arms folded, and watched him. The place smelled of solvent and hot metal, and it was the first place in a week where her breathing came all the way back.
"Tell me the worst," she said.
"The tank," Paul said. "Frank's paint is the original factory lacquer, Carrie. Forty-eight years. You cannot buy that. You cannot mix that. That color exists in exactly one place on earth, and this is it." He ran a careful finger along the black stripe. "The black can come off, though. There's a man in Carson City who removes paint the way surgeons remove tumors, layer by layer. If the stripe is young — and it is — he can lift it without touching what's underneath. It will cost."
"Give me numbers, Paul."
He had them ready in a notebook, in handwriting so neat it looked printed. The Carson City specialist: eleven hundred. The mirror assembly, new old stock, an Ohio warehouse find: two hundred forty. Re-chroming the exhaust where the gravel had bit through: six hundred. Handlebars, cables, a full mechanical once-over, because a bike that has fallen has secrets: nine hundred and change. Fluids. Seals. Labor — his own at half rate, entered before Carrie could open her mouth; when she did, he raised one finger and said, "Don't."
"The whole of it," he said, and turned the notebook around. "Three thousand eight hundred dollars, and she'll be what she was — as close as human beings can make her. There'll be a scar in the chrome on the left pipe only you and I will ever find. I'll show you where it hides, and you can decide whether it's a scar or a story."
Three thousand eight hundred dollars. The bike's paper value — the number an insurance table somewhere assigned to a 1974 Electra Glide — was less. Not much less, but less. Carrie stood doing the widow's arithmetic she had done over every roof estimate for two years, hating that she was doing it over Frank's motorcycle at all.
"I'll need to think," she said.
"Take the week," Paul said. "She's not going anywhere."
Thursday night the Riders met in the back room of the Rusty Spur, where they had planned Frank's memorial ride and a hundred charity runs. Carrie was home, asleep in her chair before the television, when the phone rang at ten and woke her heart going like a drum.
"Carrie Doyle," said Ray Novak's voice. "I'm calling to inform you of a thing already done, so you can save the breath of objecting to it."
"Ray. What have you done."
"Deb passed a helmet tonight. Frank's spare — it's been behind the bar since the funeral; nobody had the heart to move it. She set it on the bar and said, 'You all know what for,' and that's all she said." A pause, and in it Carrie could hear the grin of a man who did not grin often. "Three thousand, nine hundred and twelve dollars, Carrie. Cash, most of it. Pete Delgado put in the change from his ranch check. Marcus's boy put in his birthday money — he's nine, and he wrote his name on the envelope. It's at the shop already. Paul has his instructions: the bill's paid, the bike's to be made whole, and arguers get sent to me."
Carrie sat in the dark, the television murmuring, the phone warm against her ear.
"Raymond Novak," she said. "I did not ask this club for money. I have never—"
"You asked for nothing," Ray said, gently, in the voice he used on spooked horses and grieving women: quietly, and without sudden moves. "You made one phone call, and it wasn't to a bank. You're not a case, Carrie. You're family collecting what family's owed. Frank paid into that helmet for thirty years — every stranded stranger he stopped for, every rookie he taught to ride in the rain — and the account's being read back to you. Let him be generous, old girl. He'd want the last word."
Old girl. Nobody had called her that in two years, because nobody else had the right.
"Twelve dollars left over," she said, because her voice needed somewhere safe to land. "The arithmetic offends me, Raymond."
"Paul's buying coffee with it," Ray said. "He's aware of the offense. Sleep now, Carrie."
She slept — the first full night since Saturday. Across town, in a clean shop on East Line Street, a cream-and-teal motorcycle stood upright on a lift in the lamplight, waiting, patient as ever, to be made whole.