The weeks before October filled up with preparation the way a church fills before a wedding — everyone suddenly busy with tasks that were half practical and half ceremonial, and nobody willing to say which half mattered more.
Otis went over the Harley the way surgeons go over a patient the night before the operation that counts. He changed fluids that did not need changing. He replaced a cable because "it looked at me wrong." He fitted the sidecar himself, twice, unbolting and rebolting the mounts until the torque satisfied some private standard, and then he stood back with grease to the elbows and said, "She'll carry what she's asked to carry," which, from Otis, was practically a blessing in Latin.
The sidecar had a history of its own, which Noah extracted over three Saturdays like a serial story. It had carried the St. Matthew's kids at the charity rides, strapped in and screaming with joy at fifteen miles an hour. It had carried a bride once — "long story," said Otis. It had carried, one Fourth of July, a washtub of ice and two hundred cans of soda for the whole town picnic, and once, memorably, an extremely pleased therapy dog named Biscuit, who had worn goggles. Noah tried the goggles on. Sarah, watching from the garage door with her arms crossed, found herself laughing at her son in a biker sidecar wearing dog goggles, and then had to sit down on the oil-stained curb for a minute because the laughing kept sliding, without asking her permission, toward the other thing. Ray sat down next to her, without comment, and waited it out with her, the way you wait out weather, and when she could, she said, "He used to sit like this. Daniel. On curbs. Anywhere. He'd just — fold down wherever he was, like his legs were happy to stop."
"I remember," Ray said. "He'd sit on that curb right there and eat a sandwich and argue about carburetors he couldn't fix."
"He couldn't fix anything with an engine."
"He could draw anything with an engine. There's a difference and it's not small, Sarah. Half the mechanics I know can fix a bike and couldn't tell you why it's beautiful. Daniel could tell you why it was beautiful and let you do the fixing. It worked out. It worked out for eleven years of building that thing out there." He nodded at the showroom. "Everything on that bike that matters came off a seventeen-year-old's pencil. I was just the hands."
Sarah rehearsed the route in the Subaru, twice, alone — drove it slowly on a Sunday morning with a notebook: the school, where Noah would insist on waving at the art room windows; Main Street, the diner, the window with the pie; the garage; the turn onto the quarry road; the long rise of Beacon Hill. Twelve minutes, all of it. Fourteen, at parade speed. She timed the lights. She noted where the road was patched and where it wasn't. She was aware that she was rehearsing a fourteen-minute motorcycle ride with the thoroughness of a moon landing, and she did not care, because rehearsing was how Sarah Carter loved things — Daniel had known it; he'd written his rules knowing she'd write hers; two list-makers, raising a boy between their lists, one of them gone and still, somehow, initialing the pages.
Noah practiced too. He practiced sitting still on the bike in the showroom — a discipline, it turned out, on par with anything the boy had ever attempted. He practiced the wave: not a big wave, he'd decided, a cool wave, one hand, like riders do. He practiced, in the garage mirror, not grinning too much. The grin kept winning.
And at the facility, Thomas practiced too, in his way: Adele reported that he had begun refusing his afternoon nap, and sitting up, and looking at the door at the hour visits usually started, with an alertness the staff hadn't seen in years — a man, they said, who had somewhere to be in October, and intended to be awake for it.
There was also the matter of the boots. Noah's feet, like everything else about the boy that autumn, were growing faster than the budget for them, and Ray's solution — a pair of proper riding boots, sized with room, appearing one Saturday in a box with no card — set off the only real argument Sarah and Ray had all fall. "You don't buy my son footwear," she said, and Ray, who had faced down state troopers and rival clubs with less trepidation, said, "They're safety equipment," and Sarah said, "They're boots, Ray, with a price tag you tore off like a criminal," and Otis, from under a lift, offered the Solomon judgment that ended it: boots were safety equipment, Sarah would pay the club back in baked goods at a rate of one pie per ten dollars, and the matter was thereafter known in the garage as the Great Boot Settlement, with installments of apple and peach arriving on Saturdays into November, long after the debt, by any arithmetic but Sarah's, had been paid in full.