Billy Raines did not miss a Saturday after the eighth one. He did not miss an hour of a Saturday. He began arriving before the coffee, and he began β to Mara's careful, unspoken approval β to gravitate toward the far end of the bay, toward the work that was waiting for all of them at the end of the season, and to ask the questions a man asks when asking has become a form of repayment.
It was Billy who found, in week ten, the thing in the Softail's saddlebag that nobody had thought to inventory: not the sprung one β the other one, the intact one, which the court photographer had shot and released and which Mara had stored, latched, on a shelf. Inside, under a rain suit gone stiff with age, was a small oilcloth roll. Inside the roll were tools. Not a kit β tools, chosen, each one worn in a particular place, and one of them a wrench whose handle had been ground and re-wrapped in tape by a man adjusting it to a grip that had begun, in his last year, to fail him.
Evelyn stood in the bay holding that wrench for a long time.
"He modified it at the end," she said finally. "When his hands started shaking. He never told me. He just β kept adapting the tool so he could keep working, and never said a word about it, because he didn't want the bike to become about that." She turned it over. The tape was old and clean-edged, wound with the patience of a man who had known his time was short and spent it on this. "He was still riding in his head. Still planning to need it."
Mara let the silence do its work before she spoke, because Mara Ellison was a master of two trades and only one of them used wrenches. "What do you want done with it?"
"I want it used." Evelyn's voice surprised her with its steadiness. "Not framed. He'd hate framed. Put it in the shop set, Mara. When the work on the bike starts, I want that wrench in the work. His hands, my handsβ" She stopped, and did not finish the sentence in the direction it was going, and chose a better one. "Theirs. All of it in the same machine. That's what it was always for."
So the restoration of the Softail began the way Mara had planned it from the first morning, as the season's summit, earned in stages: the three of them, under supervision so close it amounted to a laying-on of hands, took the bent bar off Daniel's motorcycle and straightened what could be straightened and replaced what could not, learning the difference, which Mara maintained was the whole of mechanics and most of life. The floorboard. The controls. The sprung saddlebag, whose latch Billy rebuilt three times until it closed with the exact, soft, expensive snick it had made in Daniel's lifetime, at which point Billy stood holding it for a moment with an expression that made Sam look away.
Evelyn worked beside them. That had been her condition, set down in Mara's office with the tank decision, and she would not be moved from it: it was her motorcycle and her husband and her season too, and she was not going to sit in a chair and be restored at. Her hands went where theirs went β into the degreaser's bite, under the lift, into the bright, fiddly, unforgiving small work of a machine built by a man whose standards were waiting inside every fastener. Sam learned she knew the notebook by page. Billy learned she could break a seized bolt with a technique Daniel had written down and she had practiced, and that it involved patience, leverage, and absolutely no swearing until the exact moment of victory, at which point a certain amount was traditional.
And Garrett β Garrett worked the other bays.
Not sullenly. That was the thing that would have been easy to miss, and Evelyn did not miss it. He worked well: hard, skilled, increasingly trusted by Mara with the hopeless machines and the owners in despair, a man finding out in public that he had a trade in him and hating how much it mattered to him. But when the work on the Softail paused at noon, he ate alone at the far bench. When the tank came up in conversation, his face closed like a shop at six. He would hold a light for the bike. He would fetch for the bike. He would do the arithmetic of torque specs for the bike out loud, accurately, from memory.
He would not put a hand on it. Not once. And the nearer the season came to the tank β to the prep work, the sanding, the day when somebody's hands would have to work around a white line and stop, on purpose, and leave exactly one hair of it standing β the quieter Garrett Cole became, like a man listening to a sound getting closer through a wall.
"He knows," Mara said to Evelyn in the office, in week twelve, without preamble.
"Knows what?"
"That it's his." Mara jerked her chin toward the far bench. "The last piece of work in this garage has his name on it and he knows it, and he's walking toward it at one Saturday a week, and there is not a thing you or I can do to make that walk shorter. Only longer. So we don't discuss it. We let him arrive."