Paul called it for a Thursday, late in the afternoon, when the light came into the shop sideways. He had phoned the night before with the message he used for all large occasions: "Tomorrow. Four o'clock. Wear the boots."
Before the start, Paul walked her around the bike the way he had walked her around it in the bad weeks, except that then it was damage and now it was repair. New old-stock fender, correct year. Tank stripped, the dent raised by a man in Reno who did not ask questions, painted in Lone Pine. Carburetor rebuilt — "Chase did the carb," Paul said, "under supervision, which means I watched him do it twice." Seat recovered in the original grain. Wiring new. Engine sound, he'd stake the shop on it. "Everything she was," he said, "she is again."
The Electra Glide stood in the middle of the bay on its own two wheels for the first time in months, and Carrie stopped in the doorway the way she had stopped a hundred times in worse circumstances — but this time the breath she took was all pleasure. The cream-and-teal paint had cured to a depth you could fall into. The tank sat gleaming under the shop lights, whole, un-dented. New rubber. New wiring loomed in cloth the old way. Every bolt Chase had touched — and Paul had made him touch many, slowly, some of them twice — sat torqued and true.
"She's not a motorcycle yet," Paul said. "She's a rumor of one. We find out today if she intends to be real."
Ray was there, leaning on the bench with the ease of a man who had never once hurried a machine. Chase stood at the parts washer with his hands folded. He had asked Paul that morning — Paul told her later — whether he could check the oil before the start. Paul had said yes. Chase had checked it three times.
Paul walked the ritual the way Frank used to, aloud, for the room. Fuel. Petcock. Choke. He looked at Carrie. "Your key, I think."
She had brought Frank's key on its worn brass ring, the one she had kept on her own ring since the funeral, warm from her pocket. Her hand was steady. She put the key in and turned it and the little jewel of the indicator light came on, patient amber, and the shop seemed to inhale.
Paul's thumb found the starter.
The engine turned over — slow, reluctant, a great beast clearing its throat — and coughed, and did not catch. Nobody moved. Paul made a small adjustment and nodded at her.
"Again," he said. "Talk to her if you want. Frank swore she could hear."
"Come on, then," Carrie said, quietly, to the motorcycle. "You've rested long enough."
This time it caught.
It caught with a roar that was mostly shock and settled, within seconds, into the great uneven idle that had been the background music of twenty years of her life — that loping, deliberate thunder, potato-potato, shaking the floor through the soles of her boots. Paul stood with his hand still out, fingers spread, conducting nothing. Ray closed his eyes. And in the first moment of that enormous familiar noise, nobody in the shop said a word, because there was nothing the engine was not saying for all of them.
Chase turned away. He turned with great deliberateness toward the tool wall and stood looking at the wrenches as if their arrangement urgently needed study, and his shoulders shook once, and Carrie saw it and looked away herself, because some mercies in that shop ran in both directions and she had learned the price of them.
She laughed then — surprised by it, the laugh arriving tangled up with tears she did not bother to wipe, standing in the noise and the good smell of warm oil with her hand flat on the tank, feeling the idle pulse up through her palm like a returning heartbeat.
Paul let it run a full minute before he shut it down. The silence afterward rang like a bell that had been struck once.
"There she is," Ray said, into the ringing quiet. "Hello, girl."
Carrie swung her leg over and settled into the seat with the engine cooling and ticking around her, and the fit of it — the reach to the bars, the weight balanced under her — was so exactly the fit of twenty years of memory that her breath went unsteady again. Paul was already talking about tomorrow, a short loop, the fairgrounds road and back, him following in the truck. Chase had retrieved his composure and one of the shop rags and was polishing a spot on the front fender that did not need polishing, with enormous concentration.
"Chase," Carrie said.
He looked up.
"She sounds right," she said. "You did some of that."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and his voice held, mostly. "Some of it was me."
Chapter 19: The Toy Run