Chapter 23: The Grandson
Eli Nolan was five years old and had clearly decided, sometime on the drive down, that this day was a formal occasion. He sat up very straight in booth six with his dinosaur stationed beside his plate like a bodyguard, and when Walt slid in across from him β Hannah beside the boy, her hand resting lightly on his back β Eli studied the big grey-bearded stranger with the total, unembarrassed attention of a scientist.
"Are you the real one?" Eli asked.
"The real what, buddy?"
"The real Grandpa Bike." Eli pointed at the photograph taped to Hannah's phone case β there was no photograph on Hannah's phone case, but she understood, and so did Walt. "Mom shows me. You have a beard in real life too."
"I do," Walt said. "It comes standard."
"Is your bike the biggest bike in the world?"
Walt considered this with the gravity it deserved. "There's bikes longer," he said. "There's one in Florida with a sidecar like a bathtub. But mine's the biggest one on this lot, and it's the biggest one I've ever sat on, and I've sat on plenty."
"How fast does it go?"
"Faster than I'm allowed to tell your mother."
Hannah made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite not. "Dad."
"It goes the speed limit, Eli," Walt said. "Everywhere. Even in Ohio."
"Can it fly a little? On hills?"
"On the right hill, coming down, it believes it can. I don't correct it. Encouragement matters."
Eli nodded, satisfied, and turned to the menu with the air of a man who has confirmed the important things and can now attend to lunch. Megan arrived with her pad and the patience of a woman who had been waiting three years for this table to exist.
"And what'll the gentleman have?" she asked Eli.
"Pie," Eli said. "The biggest one. Like his bike."
"Apple, cherry, or chocolate cream?"
Eli looked at Walt. Walt, who had eaten pie in this booth for thirty years, who had opinions about pie the way other men had opinions about politics, felt the whole table wait for him and understood he was being handed something.
"Chocolate cream," he said, "is the pie of record in this diner. Ruth makes the crust with lard and spite, and it has never once been beaten."
"Chocolate cream," Eli told Megan, "for the table. Three forks." He had clearly inherited the family way of deciding things.
It came with the crust dark at the edges and the top swirled high, and Walt cut it β because Hannah nodded at him, a small nod, *go ahead* β and that was when it happened: his hands, those great machinist's hands that could seat a bearing by feel and thread a bolt in the dark, shook. Just slightly. Just enough that the knife chattered once against the plate, and the first slice leaned like a tired house. He steadied it with his thumb and got it onto Eli's plate and nobody said a word about it, but Hannah had seen. She was looking at his hands β at the tremor, at the care underneath it β and something in her own chest, some bolt that had been cross-threaded for twenty years, gave a quarter-turn toward loose.
"Your hands shake," Eli announced, around a mouthful, with the pure public honesty of the very young.
"They do sometimes," Walt said.
"Why?"
"Because this is an important piece of pie," Walt said, "and they know it."
Eli accepted this completely. He ate his slice and then, policy established, he ate most of a second, and he told Walt about kindergarten, and about the dinosaur, whose name was Kevin, and about a loose tooth that was, at present, more of a rumor than a fact. Walt answered every question as it came, one by one, no question too small to deserve a real answer. *Do motorcycles sleep?* They rest. *Do they dream?* Only the old ones. *Is Kevin allowed in the diner?* Kevin, Walt said, looking at the dinosaur, is clearly a regular.
Hannah ate almost nothing. She drank her coffee and watched her father be, for the first time in her son's life, exactly the man she had spent eight years insisting he wasn't capable of being β present, and patient, and entirely in the room. It did not erase anything. She was careful, even in her own heart, about that. But it was a fact, and it sat on the table between the pie plates like one more thing that would have to be dealt with honestly.
When the check came, Eli had fallen asleep against her side with chocolate on his chin, the way five-year-olds end important days. Walt carried him β asked first, with his eyes, and Hannah said yes β out through the crowd that carefully did not fuss, and the boy was lighter than any part Walt Briggs had ever lifted, and heavier than all of them.