Daniel's list was not written down. That surprised nobody who had known him at seventeen and would have surprised Sarah enormously, because the Daniel of Columbus kept grocery lists on the refrigerator in handwriting like an architect's. But this list he carried in his head like a prayer, and he said it to Ray in the garage office, with the door shut and the coffee gone cold, item by item, looking at his hands.
"One," he said. "You teach him machines are tools. Not monsters. Tools. A tool doesn't have a grudge and it doesn't have a soul, it has a condition, and you respect the condition. You taught me that standing right there. If my boy grows up flinching at engines the way I flinch, that's on me, but I'm asking you to un-teach it where you can."
"Done," Ray said.
"Two. You let him choose. Everything. The bike, the drawing, the ride, all of it. Nobody steers him with guilt, nobody steers him with stories — not even good stories, Ray, not even true ones. He gets to be asked, the way I never — " He stopped. Restarted. "I left because nobody in this town could stop steering. I won't have it done to him in my name. Especially in my name."
"Done."
"Three." Now Daniel looked up, and this one cost him. "One ride. When he's ready — and Sarah says when he's ready, Ray, her word, not yours, not his, not mine from a grave. When Sarah says. Once. On that bike. The route I never — the ride I never took. He finishes it for me." His voice thinned. "That's the — that's the thing I couldn't do. I built a whole life to not do it. So. Let my boy finish the ride."
Ray was silent a while. "And four?"
"Four," Daniel said, "is you let him finish what I couldn't. And that's not the ride, that's — " He stood up, abruptly, and went to the window that looked down into the bay, where the Harley stood. "There's things buried, Ray. Not just in me. There's the hill. There's my father. There's a box with his name on it — with your initials on it — and there's the truth about that night, all of it, the parts I know and the parts only you know, and I put it off so long I may not get to be the one who — " He pressed his forehead, briefly, to the cool glass. "If I run out of clock, you don't let it stay buried. You hear me? Whatever it takes. The boy gets the whole of it. Not the tidy version. The whole of it."
"I hear you," Ray said.
Later — weeks later, in the hospital, on a good day that had the cruelty of looking like a turning point — Daniel asked for the bike to be brought to the parking lot, and Otis and two of the brothers trailered it down with the reverence of pallbearers, and Daniel sat on it in the spring sun in his paper wristband and his backward cap, and held the bars, and wept once, briefly, without hiding it. And then he grinned for the photograph Otis took, because he'd decided the photograph was the one Noah would get: not the dying man, the rider.
That night he wrote on the back of the print in a hand already going shaky, and gave it to Ray wrapped in the blue bandanna Ray's grandmother had hemmed before either of them was born.
"You keep it till it's time," Daniel said.
"How'll I know it's time?"
"You'll know," Daniel said, "because it'll scare you half to death first."
Eleven months after the funeral, on a June Saturday, it scared Ray Dawson half to death — in a parking lot, in front of twelve brothers and a screaming woman, in the hand of an eight-year-old boy holding a white paint marker.
Ray kept the photograph the way he'd kept everything of Daniel's: exactly, and without display. It lived in the bandanna, in the saddlebag, through rain rides and charity runs and one memorable night in a ditch outside Lima, and the brothers learned not to ask about it the way you learn not to ask a man about a scar that has its own weather. Once — once only, in the winter after the funeral, at the garage Christmas party, with two whiskeys in him, which for Ray Dawson was an ocean — Otis had asked what Daniel had said at the end, in the hospital, and Ray had looked into his cup for a while and said: "He said the boy'd come to the bike before the bike could come to the boy. He said it like a weather report. I thought it was the morphine." He'd finished the cup. "It wasn't the morphine."