Chapter 15: The Tank
The tank came off the Glide on a Monday and went onto Paul's bench on a bed of folded towels, and it was, Carrie thought, the saddest object she had ever seen indoors: Frank's cream paint gouged down to metal in three long scars, the teal band scuffed gray, the whole proud curve of it looking like something that had been punished for being loved.
Paul worked the dents out first, a little at a time, with a dolly and a hammer and a patience that bordered on the theological. Then came primer. Then came the cream β not sprayed, not quite, but laid in thin coats and rubbed back and laid again, the way the factory had done it when a 1974 was not yet an antique but merely a motorcycle somebody's husband was proud of. The teal went on last, masked to a line so fine that Paul stood back twice with his arms folded before he nodded at his own work.
Chase wet-sanded the clear, under supervision, in silence.
Carrie had not expected to feel anything particular watching this, and so she was unprepared for the afternoon Paul waved her over with two fingers and said, "It's ready for the badge. Tell me you still have it."
She did still have it. She had had it all along, and the knowing of where it was rose up in her so fast it embarrassed her: bottom drawer of the dresser, left side, under Frank's good shirts that she had not been able to give away, in the cedar box with his cufflinks and a Saint Christopher medal and her mother's rosary. The tank badge β cream enamel, a teal wing, the lettering raised β had come off the Glide in 1998 when Frank repainted her the first time, and he had meant to remount it and had never quite done it, and it had lived in the drawer ever since like a word a sentence was still waiting for.
She drove home and got it. She wrapped it in a shop towel for the drive back, and held it on her lap at the stoplights like something breathing.
In the shop, Paul took it from her with both hands. "Ah," he said. "There it is." He polished the enamel with his thumb, slow, and the wing came up bright. Then he did a thing Carrie had not anticipated: he turned and held it out β not to her, but to Chase, who stood at the bench with wet-sanding grit still gray under his fingernails and an expression of pure alarm.
"Mount it," Paul said.
"Me?" Chase said. "Paul β no. I shouldn't β that's the one part β "
"It is the one part," Paul agreed. "That is why. The adhesive is there. The marks are there. Hands steady, eyes open. A man should finish what he starts, including the parts that frighten him."
Carrie's heart went up into her throat and stayed there. She could have stopped it. She knew, standing there with her purse over her arm, that one word from her would stop it β and she understood, all at once, that this had been the destination of every condition she had set in that conference room. Not the broom. This. The boy's shaking hands, learning to be steady, on the most precious inch of the whole machine.
Chase took the badge. He cleaned the mounting surface three times. He breathed the way people breathe at the edge of high places, and he set the cream-and-teal wing onto the tank in one motion so true that Paul, afterward, could find no adjustment to make, and tried, and gave up trying.
"There," Paul said. "Now it's a motorcycle again."
Paul wiped his hands and stepped back, and for a while nobody in the shop found a reason to move. The tank caught the bay light and threw it in a cream band across the concrete. Chase kept looking from the badge to his hands, as if astonished they could be trusted with something. Grief had taught her that hands could fail at the simplest tasks: buttons, keys, sentences. Watching him learn steadiness made her own feel less like relics and more like instruments.
Chase stood looking at it with his hands hanging empty at his sides, and he did not speak, and after a moment Carrie crossed the bay and stood beside him. "Your grandfather had hands like that," she said, surprising herself entirely. "My father. He could set a hinge by eye. Frank always said hands remember what the head apologizes for."
The boy nodded, once, unable to trust his voice, and Carrie turned back to the tank and laid her palm flat against the cool cream curve, over twenty years and one long winter of loss, and felt the whole of it β the ditch, the rain, the phone call, the broom β settle, at last, into the shape of a road going somewhere.