2. Levi
LEVI
The carburetor doesn’t need rebuilding. That’s the honest truth of it.
It idled a little rough, that’s all, and a smarter man would’ve adjusted the mixture and moved on to the brake job that’s actually paying this week.
Instead I’ve got the whole thing broke down to parts on a shop rag like I’m performing surgery, jets soaking in a coffee can of carb cleaner, because my hands need somewhere to be for a few hours where my head can’t follow.
Three weeks today. Not that I’m counting.
I’m absolutely counting. I count it the way you count days since a crash—there’s the day of, and then there’s after, and everything that happens now happens in after, even the good stuff.
Especially the good stuff. Josie laughed at something dumb I said this morning, real laugh, coffee nearly out her nose, and some meter in my chest logged it automatically: day twenty-one, she laughed, you don’t deserve it.
What I’ve been doing instead is being good.
That’s the plan, if you can call it a plan.
Coming home early. Cooking. Bringing Josie flowers from the Gas-N-Go cooler because a real flower shop means standing there too long with somebody watching me pick, and I don’t trust what my face does lately when I’ve got too long to think.
Being sweeter to her than I’ve been in a year, maybe two, and every time she smiles at me for it something in my gut turns over like a bad bearing.
Last night she fell asleep on the couch with her feet in my lap, middle of some baking show, and I sat there not moving for an hour so I wouldn’t wake her.
Watched the TV tell me about somebody’s collapsed sponge cake with her toes hooked under my thigh, and my chest hurt the whole time.
That’s the other thing nobody tells you about what I did—it doesn’t feel like guilt the way you’d think, some dramatic thing that shows up at night with a violin.
It feels like that. An hour of your girl sleeping on you, trusting you with her whole weight, and your chest hurting because you know something she doesn’t.
The math I keep running is: if I’m good enough now, it cancels out. Stack enough good days on top of the one bad night and eventually the pile’s tall enough you can’t see the bottom of it.
I know the math doesn’t work. I’m not that dumb.
I keep running it anyway because the other option is telling her, and every time I get near that thought—actually near it, close enough to picture her face—my whole body just noes right out of it, like touching a hot manifold.
Can’t. Won’t. Not yet. Some version of never sounds pretty good too.
Here’s the thing I’ve never said out loud to anybody, drunk or sober: I’ve never been sure I believe in forever.
Not the way other people seem to. Not as a thing a man can promise at thirty-one and still mean at sixty.
My old man promised it. Look how that went.
The club, now—the club I believe in with everything I got.
Wyatt, Tucker, Reyes, the patch, Sunday dinners at the long table.
That’s bedrock. That’s never once felt like a bet.
But a woman? A whole future, some little permanent version of me running around decades from now, me still choosing her on purpose every morning when I’m old and my knees are shot?
That scares me worse than anything’s ever scared me, and I’ve been in fights where I genuinely didn’t know if I was walking out.
And Josie happened to me anyway. That’s the only way I know how to put it.
I didn’t decide her. Some things don’t ask your permission, they just roll in like weather off the Absarokas and by the time you see it coming you’re already soaked.
Three years now and I still watch her cross a room like I’m sixteen.
Still. So I stayed, and I never promised forever out loud, and I told myself that was honest. Maybe it was just cheap.
Three weeks ago it got real cheap.
“Yo.” Tucker’s head pops around the lift, safety glasses shoved up in his hair where they do nothing. “You seen the three-eighths drive? The good one.”
“Wherever you left it.”
“Helpful. Real helpful.” He comes over anyway, wiping his hands, and stands there looking at my bench like the socket’s going to confess. Then he looks at the carburetor. “That the Henderson bike?”
“Yep.”
“Didn’t that thing run fine?”
“Idled rough.”
“Levi. Brother.” He picks a jet out of the coffee can, squints at it, drops it back in. “You got it broke down like you’re rebuilding a watch. The Road King brake job’s been sitting since Friday, and that one’s actual money.”
“I’ll get to it.”
“Uh-huh.” He looks at me a second longer than he needs to.
Tucker’s dumb like a fox—plays the idiot because it’s funnier, but he’s known me since we were both prospects sleeping in the back room, and there’s a beat where I think he’s going to say something real.
Then he doesn’t, because we don’t. “Well. When the watch is done, Henderson’s gonna be thrilled his hundred-dollar bike got the full restoration.
” He wanders off toward the parts shelves, hollering at Rusty about the socket, and I get another twenty minutes of quiet.
“You gonna marry that carburetor or what?”
Wyatt. I didn’t hear him come in over Tucker’s chainsaw pipe, which tells you where my head’s at, because Wyatt Doss hasn’t snuck up on anybody in twenty years, he’s built like a garage door.
President of Paradise MC for as long as I’ve been alive to care, and he still fetches his own coffee from Dot’s and everybody else’s too—two cups, hands me one.
His way. Been his way since I prospected in at nineteen with a chip on my shoulder the size of a fuel tank.
“It’s therapeutic,” I say.
“It’s a Tuesday brake job you’re ignoring is what it is.
” He leans on the bench, blows on his coffee.
“And while I got you—fall run. You’re road captain, act like it.
Reyes wants the route filed before August so he can do his sweep of the stops, and if you leave it late again I get to listen to him about it, and I’m too old to listen to Reyes about anything. ”
“Route’s half done.” It’s not a lie. It’s half done in my head, which is where all my best routes live until the week before.
Planning the club’s runs is the one piece of paperwork I’ve never minded—a map, a county road nobody salts, a diner worth stopping at—the patch on my cut that actually means something because Wyatt didn’t give it to me, ten years of riding lead earned it.
“Uh-huh. On paper, Levi.” He takes a pull of coffee. “Anyway. Saturday. Clubhouse. You and Josie, don’t make plans.”
“What’s Saturday?”
“Your anniversary party, dumbass.”
“Our anniversary’s not—“ I actually have to think. “It’s Thursday.”
“And the party’s Saturday, ’cause that’s when people don’t work.
Three years, Levi. Dot’s already got a guest list going, so there’s no point arguing about it, the machine’s runnin’.
” He says it with that flat weathered warmth he does, like he’s reading you the forecast. “Whole town’s coming. Casey’s doing a cake.”
Three years. A party. Everybody we know in one room raising a glass to me and Josie while I stand there with three weeks of rot in my chest and smile.
“You don’t gotta do all that,” I say.
“Ain’t for you. It’s for her.” He grins into his coffee. “And Dot. Mostly Dot. Woman’s been waiting on an excuse to use them string lights since the Fourth got rained out.” He watches me over the rim a second. “Three years, though. That’s something, for you.”
“For me.”
“You know what I mean.” He says it easy, no edge on it, which is how Wyatt says everything that has an edge. “Longest anything’s stuck to you that ain’t got two wheels. Kind of thing a man might want to think about making official someday, is all I’m saying.”
“You writing for Hallmark now?”
“I’m just saying. Casey’s doing a cake either way.” He pushes off the bench, then stops, snaps his fingers like he’s remembering the milk. “Oh—Nell went and hired a photographer for it. Real one, does it professional. That Quinn girl, moved back to town a few months back.”
My hands go still on the carburetor.
There’s a float bowl in my left hand and a screwdriver in my right and I am looking at them very, very carefully, like the job needs precision all of a sudden. Like my ears aren’t ringing.
“Marley Quinn,” Wyatt says, like it’s nothing, wiping grease off his own knuckles with somebody else’s rag. “Guess she does weddings and all that now. Nell says she’s good.”
And I make my face do absolutely nothing—nothing, not one thing—while my stomach drops straight through the concrete floor.