Chapter 29: Her Own Bike
The motorcycle was a nine-year-old middleweight cruiser, dark green, with twenty-eight thousand honest miles on it and a dent in the tank shaped like somebody's bad afternoon. It sat in a barn outside town with a for-sale sign wired to the handlebar and an owner who kept saying the word classic. I found it the way I find everything now: I read the listing twice, checked the title, and brought witnesses.
Bear and Ike came with me, because a first bike gets inspected by people who know where they hide their sins. They circled it like surgeons. Ike bounced the forks, spun the wheel, sniffed the oil, and ran a magnet along the frame where paint can lie about what is under it. Bear crouched at the engine and listened to it idle for a full minute with his eyes closed, and the seller stopped saying classic somewhere in that minute, out of respect or fear.
"Chain's stretched," Ike announced. "Tires are old enough to vote. Sprockets are shark-toothed. She'll need all of it, plus a battery, plus the valve check nobody ever does."
"How much to make her right?" I asked, and he told me, and I added it to the asking price in my head and offered the seller a number that accounted for every flaw out loud, one by one, politely, the way Ruth Ann had taught me to negotiate: like a person reading an invoice to a storm. The seller looked at Bear, hoping for a rescue. Bear was studying the sky with enormous interest. We settled where I had planned to settle. I paid out of the shop account I keep separate — my wages, my overtime, money I had earned standing at my own bench in my own building — and I signed the title transfer at the kitchen table of that barn, reading every line first, out loud.
Nobody gave me that bike. That is the whole of it. I bought it the way my father bought his first lathe: slowly, suspiciously, and outright.
Bringing her home took the truck, because I was not yet licensed to do anything but practice in lots, and Ike drove while I sat beside the bike in the bed. We unloaded her into the bay, and the whole shop turned out for it. Eddie circled her once and pronounced the dent in the tank the only honest thing the seller had shown us. Walt checked the chain I already knew was stretched, and nodded at me for having written it into the price. Ruth Ann entered her in the shop book — not as inventory, as a note, in the margin, in pencil: NORA'S BIKE, PAID IN FULL. Some entries in a ledger are accounting. Some are testimony.
We did the work on her at the second bench, after paying jobs, an hour at a time. New chain and sprockets. Tires with birthdays in this decade. The valve check nobody ever does, done. I paid for every part out of the same wages account and Ruth Ann invoiced me like a stranger, at shop rate, stamped paid, because the rule applies to the name on the door first, or it applies to nobody. A gift can be taken back by weather. A receipt just sits there being true.
The first rides were in the lot behind the shop, after hours, Walt sitting on an upturned bucket as my audience of one. Helmet, jacket, gloves, boots — Ike had inspected my gear with the same suspicion he had given the motorcycle, and sent back the first helmet I bought because a bargain is not a bargain at sixty miles an hour. I did figure eights until the light went. Then the back roads, Sunday mornings, Bear ahead of me by two lengths and Ike behind, the two of them riding escort like it was a state occasion.
The bike learned me as much as I learned it. Where the clutch takes hold. How she leans when she trusts you. By the end of the month I could ride the river road without my shoulders up around my ears, and Walt said my figure eights had gotten boring to watch, which from Walt is a diploma.
The patch came in June, at the clubhouse cookout, without ceremony, which is the club's way of making ceremony bearable. Bear handed me a small rectangle of stitched cloth — FAMILY, in plain letters — while holding a paper plate of potato salad, like it was nothing. It is not nothing. The Blackpine gives that patch to almost nobody who does not wear the full colors; it means your name is said in that room the way names are said at a kitchen table. I took it home and sewed it onto my jacket myself, that night, at my own table, with crooked, honest stitches. I am not a seamstress. The thread holds. That is the biography of everything I own.