Chapter 28: The License
The DMV lot in Lewistown is a rectangle of cracked asphalt with cones that have been run over by generations of the nervous. I took my endorsement test on a borrowed 250 that belonged to Dutch's nephew, a bike so forgiving it practically apologized when you found the wrong gear.
Hammer watched from the curb with his arms crossed and his face doing nothing at all. I want to explain about Hammer's face. Other men's faces are weather. Hammer's face, when he is proud of you and has decided not to show it, is a government building. Shuttered. Official. Rita stood next to him eating sunflower seeds out of her coat pocket like it was a matinee.
The examiner was a tired woman named Flo who had seen every kind of fool the county could issue. Her voice had the finality of a screen door closing. She walked me through it: the cone weave, the swerve, the stop in the box. The 250 and I understood each other. I had been studying the manual for a month, and I had spent four Sunday mornings in the school parking lot with Dutch walking beside me at cone speed, saying, "Clutch is a conversation, Wren. You keep talking right over it."
I did the weave clean. I did the swerve and felt the bike step sideways and step back like it had remembered something. In the stop box I put my foot down once — once, at the very end, a dab like a punctuation mark — and Flo wrote something on her clipboard that took longer than I liked.
"That dab cost you two points," she said. "You had plenty. Congratulations, Miss Halloway. Try not to celebrate at speed."
I rode the 250 back across the lot to where they stood, and I want it on the record that I was composed. Rita said later that I was grinning like the sun coming up over a fence line, but Rita exaggerates. Hammer uncrossed his arms, which for him is a parade.
"You put your foot down," he said.
"Two points' worth," I said.
"It was a good place to spend them," he said, and that was the whole ceremony, and it was enough to fill the drive home and then some.
At the clubhouse that evening there was a tarp over something in the corner by the parts washer, and the whole chapter arranged around the room in the casual formation of people who have rehearsed being casual. Dutch had his hands behind his back. Kate had come, and Micah, who was in on it, vibrating at a frequency only brothers and tuning forks achieve.
"So," Hammer said. "The state says you can ride. The state has paperwork standards and parking lot standards." He nodded at the tarp. "This here's the other kind."
They pulled the tarp. It was a small used cruiser, low and dark green, older than me and in better shape — rebuilt from the frame out. New rubber, new brakes, a seat cut down an inch for a rider my size, and a tank polished to a deep shine. Around the tank, in paint pen, in six different hands, were six signatures: the mechanics who had built her. Dutch on the left side where the metal curves. A prospect's careful block letters. Rita's husband's name written small and slanted, down low, where you'd only see it if you were the one checking the oil.
"It runs," Dutch said. "We checked the way we check."
"Whose is it?" I said, because my mouth had not caught up with the rest of me.
"Yours," Rita said. "And before you start—" she held up one hand, gold ring flashing, the hand that has stopped more arguments than the county sheriff "—this is not charity. Charity is when strangers do arithmetic with your dignity. This is family math. Family math is different. In family math, a girl stops in a ditch in a snowstorm and a man gets to be alive at his own table, and the column never balances, and nobody tries to make it. You ride this bike and the column stays open. That's the arrangement. Those are the terms. Sign the tank."
"I can't sign my own—"
"You sign it last," Dutch said, and handed me the paint pen. "Owner signs last. That's the rule with a build. Rider's name goes over the signatures so the whole crew carries her."
I signed my name across the top of that green tank in white paint, Wren Halloway, in my store-counter handwriting, under the fluorescent lights with my brother holding the trouble light and sixty years of bikers standing around pretending their eyes were dry from the parts solvent.
Hammer put his hand flat on the tank when I was done, the way you'd rest a hand on a horse's neck.
"She's got a name?" he asked.