Chapter 27: The Winter
Winter came down on Hartwell the way it always did, not all at once but in installments, and the Blue Plate settled into the quiet season the way a house settles into its foundation β the breakfast regulars arriving in the dark, the plows scraping past the window, Ruth's soup rotation posted on a card by the register in her own handwriting, which had not changed since the Ford administration.
Megan Lane passed her nursing-assistant exam on the first Tuesday of December, by eleven points, with a pencil she had chewed down to a stub and two practice tests' worth of worry behind her. She found out at the testing center in Elkhart and sat in her car in the parking lot and laughed out loud, all by herself, and then she called the diner, because the diner was who you called.
Sal answered. "Well?"
"I passed."
The noise that went up in the kitchen traveled through the phone and out into the parking lot of the testing center, and Megan sat there grinning at the dashboard while Ruth shouted for details and somebody β it sounded like Walt β said something unintelligible and approving in the background, like a foghorn offering encouragement.
By January she was picking up shifts at the county clinic, two or three shifts a week, the work she had wanted since she was nineteen and life had taken its detour. But she kept two shifts at the diner, Friday nights and Sunday mornings, and when Ruth offered to hire her replacement outright she shook her head.
"This place is family," Megan said. "You don't quit family because you got a second job. You just get tired in two places."
It was in January, too, with the clinic work steadier and her footing surer, that Walt started the Saturday-morning bicycle clinic in the diner lot.
It began the way Walt's projects began, with him fixing one thing and the thing multiplying. A neighbor boy pushed his bike past the diner with the chain dragging and the brakes squealing like a screen door, and Walt, who could no more watch a machine suffer than he could watch a dog go hungry, called him over. By the time the boy rode off, chain oiled and brakes true, three more bicycles had materialized, the way bicycles do when word travels through a neighborhood at the speed of childhood.
So Walt made it official, in his way. Saturday mornings, ten to twelve, weather permitting, in the lot by the picnic tables. Bring a bike. Bring a parent. He brought his own tools, a stand he'd welded up in his garage, a tarp for the ground, and a coffee can of rags. Megan helped when she wasn't on shift, mostly with the sign-in sheet Ruth insisted on β "If it's got a sheet, it's a program," Ruth said, "and if it's a program, nobody can say it's loitering" β and with the younger kids, whose repairs were mostly a matter of patience and tassels.
He taught them the way he had been taught, which was to say by making their hands do it. Oil a chain: rag in one hand, pedal with the other, slow. Check a brake: squeeze, look, squeeze again. A chain that comes off goes back on with the wheel turned just so, and a kid who has done it once has done it forever, because the knowledge moves into the hands and stays there rent-free.
Sophie Lane was seven, nearly eight, and she attended the clinic the way other children attend a throne. She had watched Walt fix her own bike's chain in that lot the previous spring β had watched it the way surgeons watch surgery β and she had been quietly practicing on a battered practice bike Walt kept for the purpose, a green Schwinn with more rust than paint, ever since.
On the second Saturday of cold February, with the lot swept and the sun doing its best, a younger boy's chain slipped off halfway through a brake lesson, and Sophie β glancing first at her mother, the way she'd been taught, for the nod β stepped forward, crouched by the practice stand, and talked the repair out loud while her hands did it.
"You hook the top first," she said, to the boy, to the morning, to herself. "Then you roll it. It wants to go on. You just have to let it."
The chain seated with a soft, perfect click. The boy stared. Megan, behind her daughter, put both hands over her mouth in a way that had nothing to do with surprise and everything to do with the rest of it. Walt said nothing at all. He just reached out and steadied the bike while Sophie stood up, gravel on one knee, entirely unaware that she had just become the clinic's assistant instructor β a position that paid, by prior arrangement she knew nothing about, in Saturday pancakes with extra syrup.