Chapter 1: The Gravel Lot
The afternoon had gone the color of wet newspaper by the time Walter Briggs swung his cruiser off Route 40 and into the gravel lot of the Blue Plate Diner. The sky over Hartwell hung low and grey, the kind of Indiana sky that promised rain and then took its time deciding. Walt had been riding since morning, fifty miles of two-lane through corn stubble and trees, and his shoulders ached in a way that told him he was not forty anymore, or fifty either. Coffee, he thought. Coffee and pie, and then the last twenty miles home.
Halfway through the turn, gravel crunching under his tires, he saw the bicycle.
It lay on its side near the diner's front window, pink and small, one wheel turning slowly in the wind. Beside it, sitting right down in the gravel with her knees drawn up, was a little girl. She could not have been more than seven. Her blonde hair was pulled into two pigtails, one of them coming loose, and she had her face buried in her hands, and her small body shook with the kind of crying a child does when she has decided the trouble is too big to carry.
Walt stopped the bike. Traffic went past on Route 40 β a pickup, a minivan, a sedan with its windows up β and nobody slowed. He sat there a moment with the engine ticking, watching the girl cry alone in a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon, and something in his chest gave a slow, familiar turn.
He knew what he looked like. He had known for thirty years. Six feet two in boots, grey beard down to his chest, arms sleeved in tattoos faded to blue-green ghosts, black leather gone soft at the elbows. Little girls were not supposed to be comforted by men like him, and he had made his peace with that long ago. But there was nobody else in the lot, and the girl was crying, and that was the whole arithmetic of it.
He parked the cruiser by the diner's side wall and walked slowly, boots loud on the gravel so she would hear him coming from a long way off and not be startled.
"Hey there," he said, keeping his voice down in the low, easy register he used on skittish horses and dogs. He stopped a good six feet from her. "That's a fine-looking bicycle. Something gone wrong with it?"
The girl lifted her face. Her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked, her lower lip trembling in the effort not to start up again. She looked at him β at the beard, the leather, the size of him β and Walt braced himself for the flinch he had seen a hundred times.
Instead she pointed at the bicycle with one finger, the way a person points at a traitor.
"The chain came off," she said, and her voice wobbled up into a fresh sob. "It came off and I can't β I tried β Mama said stay where she can see me and I can't ride it and I can't β "
"Well," Walt said. "A chain's a fixable thing."
He crouched down β slowly, because his knees complained and because quick movements were wrong here β until he was at her level, keeping his distance respectful. Up close he could see the problem plainly: the chain had jumped the front sprocket and hung slack and greasy, and there were smears of black grease on the girl's hands where she had tried to wrestle it back.
"You've already had a go at it," he said. "I can see that. That's more than most folks would do."
She scrubbed at her face with a greasy hand, leaving a smear across one cheek like war paint. "It won't go."
"No," Walt agreed. "They never do, when you're upset. Chains can tell." He nodded toward the bicycle. "My name's Walt. I fix machines β big ones, mostly, but a chain's a chain, whether it's on a Harley or a β " he squinted at the little pink frame, " β or a serious pink racing machine such as this one. Would it be all right if I took a look?"
She considered him with the gravity of a judge. Then she nodded, once, and scooted back a foot to give him room, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
"My name's Sophie," she said. "I'm seven."
"Seven," Walt said, as he lowered himself into the gravel beside the bicycle. "Then we'll have this done in no time. Seven's a lucky number for mechanics."
He did not reach for the bike right away. He sat there in the gravel with his hands on his knees where she could see them, and let the wind turn the loose wheel, and let Sophie watch him and decide for herself that the big grey man was only what he seemed to be: somebody who had stopped.
Chapter 2: The Chain