CHAPTER FIFTY
Alex
Now
It took twenty-three days.
Saturdays mostly, with occasional evenings during the week when the light held long enough and Arthur’s homework was done. Riley would give Arthur a look that meant he’d been thinking about a particular assembly sequence and wanted to work it out.
Arthur was always ready.
I tracked it without meaning to. The progress visible each time I looked into the garage.
The frame first, bare and geometric and making its own kind of sense once you understood what it was.
Then the engine, which took three Saturdays and produced more questions from Arthur than any other component and more complete answers from Riley than I’d heard him give on any subject.
Then the smaller things. The things that made it a motorcycle rather than an assembly of parts.
Wiring. Controls. The tank, which Arthur helped position and which required adjustments that neither of them found frustrating because they’d both developed the patience of people doing something that mattered.
I watched from the steps most mornings.
Sometimes I watched from the kitchen window.
Either way I watched.
The last Saturday in April arrived cool and bright.
I woke before Arthur. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and looked at the garage. The door was closed. Riley had said the night before that they’d surely finish it if Arthur was ready.
I brought coffee out at nine-thirty.
They didn’t look up.
I set the cups on the workbench in the corner where they wouldn’t be in the way and sat on the steps and watched.
The motorcycle was almost unrecognizable from the parts I’d seen in those crates in March. It was a machine now. Whole and coherent and occupying its space in the garage with the authority of a finished thing.
Riley was on one knee beside the rear wheel. Arthur crouched beside him. They were working on something I couldn’t name and didn’t need to.
I wrapped my hands around my cup.
I thought about a girl in the desert with two flat tires.
About a cloud of dust and a motorcycle coming through it.
About eleven weeks of summer and a promise that lasted four years and then went silent for eleven and then found its way back to a garage in Marana where a man and his son were crouched beside a rear wheel on a Saturday morning in April.
I thought about all of it.
I thought it was the best story I’d ever been part of.
At noon Riley stood.
He looked the motorcycle over from one end to the other. He walked around it slowly. He crouched to check something near the front fork. He stood and checked the handlebar controls.
Riley straightened.
He looked at Arthur.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said.
Riley reached down and turned the fuel petcock. He checked the choke. He looked at Arthur and gave a single nod.
Arthur stood beside the motorcycle.
He looked at Riley.
“Go ahead,” Riley said.
Arthur approached the handlebars and put his thumb on the start button.
He looked at it for a moment. “Is it in neutral?”
Riley grinned. “Yep.”
Arthur pushed the button. The engine turned over.
Didn’t catch.
He did it again.
It caught.
The sound filled the garage. Not loud. An old, smaller displacement engine finding its idle. But alive. Running on its own. Breathing in and out with the rhythm of a machine doing what it was made to do for the first time.
Arthur stepped back.
He looked at it.
The motorcycle sat in the center of the garage and idled.
It sounded right.
Riley looked at it for a long time.
I watched his face.
Whatever he was feeling, he wasn’t rationing it out the way he usually did.
He showed a great deal right now.
He didn’t try to hide it.
He looked at the motorcycle and then at Arthur and something moved across his face that was so uncomplicated and complete that I had to look away for a moment.
Arthur was looking at the motorcycle. He hadn’t looked at Riley yet. He was giving the machine its moment. Which was so exactly the right thing to do that it told me something about the boy that I already knew and would never stop being grateful for.
Then he looked at Riley.
Riley extended his fist.
Arthur looked at it.
He made a fist and bumped it against Riley’s.
Firm. Deliberate. The weight of an agreement being made between two people who understood what agreements meant.
I thought about what I’d once known about bikers. About the way they made agreements with a look or a nod or a handshake that meant more than most people’s signatures.
I thought about fist bumps as contracts.
This one was the most binding thing I’d ever witnessed.
The motorcycle idled in the center of the garage. Arthur’s notebook was on the workbench beside the empty coffee cups. The three cardboard boxes were broken down and stacked against the wall.
Years in those boxes.
Running now.
Running because the right time had finally arrived and the right time had a name and the name was Arthur.
I looked at the two of them standing in the garage with their fists still touching.
I stood up from the steps.
I went inside.
That night the garage was empty except for a drop light and the Evo. Arthur was in the office with homework.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“You’re dirty,” I said.
He looked at my mouth. “You used to like that.”
I stepped in. He kissed me like he was still deciding if he was allowed, then decided. Grease on my jaw. He stopped first.
“Not here.”
“Then where?”
I said otherwise with my hands in his belt and then I let him go. We finished that part of the night two feet apart and breathing like we’d run.
Arthur’s door closed at nine. Martina’s light went dark a little after.
I found him at the kitchen sink washing his hands like the grease was a conversation he was still having.
I turned the water off.
He looked at me.
There was nothing left to decide.
We didn’t make it farther than the hallway. His mouth on mine tasted like soap and metal. I got his shirt over his head and put my palm on his chest and felt the day leave his body in one long breath.
He backed me against the wall the way he had once backed me against a doorframe, except this time the house was ours and the boy down the hall was asleep and nobody was coming to take the night away.
He undressed me slowly.
Not claiming. Reading.
The drop light from the garage still lived on his hands. I kissed his knuckles and tasted work. Goosebumps rose along my arms. I did not joke it off.
“Look at me,” I said.
He did.
When he pushed into me it was quiet. Intimate in the way a whisper is intimate. No Jeep. No wall we were stealing. Just a hallway and a man I had loved since I was too young to know the word and a body that remembered him without being asked.
He moved careful, then certain. We found our rhythm, and maintained a slow, steady pace for some time, watching each other as we did.
I came, in waves, like I hadn’t before. My body shuddered, from the tips of my toes to the back of my neck, just where it met my skull.
He followed, long after I was done, biting his lip and making a face the entire while. We stayed there, pressed against one another, until the wall was just a wall again.
We made it to the bed after.
I lay against his chest and listened to his heart. Grease still at the edge of my jaw.
I left it.
A moment later, I cried.
Not the complicated kind. Not the kind tangled up with regret and guilt and all the weight of what had been done and left undone.
The other kind.
The kind that comes when something that was broken for a very long time is finally, completely whole.