2. Cal
CAL
The transmission on the bench doesn’t need me.
Guy brought it in swearing it was slipping in third, and it took me about ten minutes to figure out the problem is the guy, not the trans—rides the clutch like he’s scared of it—but I’ve got the whole thing torn down anyway, parts laid out on a shop towel in order, because my hands want something to do and this is what I’ve got.
Paradise Valley Cycle & Salvage, nine-fifteen on a Tuesday.
Radio’s on the classic rock station because Wyatt owns the radio and Wyatt owns the shop and that’s the whole discussion.
Somebody’s cutting sheet metal out back—Tucker, by the sound of it, he leans on the grinder too hard—and the smell drifts in, hot metal and burn.
Rusty’s got a Softail up on the near lift, whistling along with the radio a half-beat off the actual song, easy as he always is about everything.
Nine years I’ve been breathing that smell. It smells like rent paid.
Nine years. I catch myself doing the math again, wiping down a gear that’s already clean. Six weeks to the vote. Five and a half, if I’m honest, and I am, because I count it every damn day now like a kid counting down to Christmas, which is embarrassing, so I keep it to myself.
Nine years ago I walked into this shop with a toolbox and nothing else. No name that meant anything. No dad who rode with anybody, no uncle who prospected back in the day, none of that.
Half the guys in this club got walked in the door by their own blood. Shane Pruitt’s family goes back three generations here. Casey grew up doing homework in the front office her dad still runs the club out of.
Me, I got looked at for about two years like I might steal something.
Earned the bench. Earned the runs—riding tail-end drag position in front of Tucker, eating everybody’s dust, hauling the support truck when they told me to haul the support truck, cleaning the clubhouse toilets after parties I wasn’t senior enough to enjoy.
Earned the prospect rocker four years back and I’ve worn it longer than anybody should have to, and in six weeks the patched men in that room are going to put their hands up or they’re not, and either way I’ll know exactly where I stand. Which is all I’ve ever asked of anything.
“Bramwell.” Levi Ford leans in the bay door, keys spinning on one finger. “You seen the shim kit?”
“Second drawer, red cabinet. Under the gasket paper, because somebody buried it.”
“Somebody’s a son of a bitch.” He finds it, holds it up, salutes with it. “You coming Saturday? Short run, up past the reservoir and back. Wyatt wants a full pack.”
“I’m there.”
“Course you’re there. You’re always there.” He says it easy, no edge, and he’s gone before I can decide if that was a compliment. From Levi it probably was.
Man’s got a wife and a new baby at home and still shows for every run—road captain, forms the whole pack up behind him, and last year the whole town watched him nearly lose everything and claw it back. If Levi Ford says you’re always there, you write that down somewhere.
I get the first gear seated and my head goes where it goes when my hands are busy, which is home. Tessa, this morning, standing at the counter in my shirt drinking that syrup she calls coffee, giving me shit about the keys. I stood in the hallway a second before she saw me and just looked.
I don’t have the word for what that does to me. Full. Something like full.
Two years and I still get to come home to that, and I don’t know what I did right, and I’ve quit asking, because you don’t jinx a running engine by tearing it down to see why it runs.
Everything I’ve got, I built. The bike. The bench. The house with her jacket on the hook next to mine. Losing any of it doesn’t even make the list of things I worry about. I’m careful. Careful’s the one thing I’ve always been.
My phone buzzes against my leg.
I finish seating the countershaft before I check it, because a thing half-done is a thing done wrong. Wipe my hands on the rag. Pull the phone out.
Whitney D.
I stand there and look at it a second. Same name that lit up on the counter this morning—the text I didn’t read till I was a mile down the road, pulled over on the shoulder like an idiot with the engine still running and my heart going for no reason I wanted to look at.
Three years. Haven’t heard from her in three years, and now twice before lunch.
The first text, the one from the counter, said: Hey. I know it’s been forever. I didn’t know who else to call.
This one’s longer. I read it standing at the bench. Then I read it again, slower, and my stomach drops somewhere around the second line and stays down.
Her dad. Heart attack, Sunday night, gone before the ambulance made it out to the county road. Nothing anybody saw coming—the man split his own firewood. I remember that about him. Remember him at sixty stacking cords like a guy half his age, giving me shit about my form.
Funeral’s not planned yet. Her brother’s not answering her calls, which tracks, because her brother didn’t answer her calls when I knew her either. I don’t really have anyone else in town anymore, she says. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who else to text.
I set the phone down on the bench. Pick it back up. Set it down again and stand there with my hand flat on the cold metal like the bench is going to tell me what to do about it.
Frank Doyle is dead. Shit.
I believe her, is the thing. Anybody else, I’d wonder what the angle was. But I remember exactly how alone Whitney gets when things go bad—how she folds up small and quiet and doesn’t ask anybody for a goddamn thing until she cracks all at once, usually at two in the morning, usually alone.
Watched it happen when her mom got sick, back when we were together. Held her through the worst of that one on the floor of Frank’s kitchen while the coffee went cold on the counter.
Whitney and me weren’t a war. That’s the other thing. Three years together and then two people sitting at a kitchen table saying out loud what both of them already knew—she wanted Denver, wanted bigger, wanted a version of me in a button-down shirt I was never going to be.
I wanted this. The shop, the club, the valley. Nobody threw anything. She hugged me at the door when she left and neither of us cried and that was that. Over, quiet, mutual.
Cleanest thing I ever did.
Her dad, though. Frank. Frank used to leave the porch light on for me when I dropped her off late—never said anything about it, the light was just always on, which from a man like Frank was a whole speech.
One time he showed me how to sweat a copper joint because he couldn’t believe a man my age didn’t know, stood over me in that garage going don’t drown it, kid, the solder finds the heat, and called me the sweat-fitting kid to his poker buddies for a year after.
Good man. Hard, fair, funny when he decided to be. And now he’s on a slab at the county funeral home and his daughter’s sitting in his empty house calling a brother who won’t pick up.
Something clicks on in my chest. Old wiring I forgot was still run through the walls, the circuit that used to be in charge of her bad days.
Decency, I tell myself. That’s all that is. A guy she used to know, being decent, because her dad died and she’s got nobody. I’d do the same for anybody from back then. I’d do it for her useless brother, even.
Reyes Castillo walks past the end of my bench with an exhaust pipe over his shoulder. He gives my laid-out transmission one look, gives me one look—same length, same weight—and keeps walking.
Sergeant at arms. The man vets prospects for a living and reads people like part numbers, and I put my head down over the bench till he’s gone, and then I stand there asking myself why the hell I did that.
Nothing’s happened. There’s nothing to read.
I pick the phone back up.
My thumb hangs over the screen a second. Down the bay, the grinder starts up again. The radio’s playing something with a slide guitar in it. Normal shop, normal Tuesday, and Frank Doyle is dead, and a woman I used to love is sitting in an empty house with nobody to call but me.
I type it out before I’ve decided anything: so sorry, W. that’s awful. frank was a good man. let me know what you need.
Read it once. It’s fine. It’s what you send. Anybody would send it.
Send.
The whoosh sound it makes going out is louder than it should be, or I’m imagining that. I put the phone back in my pocket and pick up the next gear, and my hands go back to work like nothing happened, because nothing did. Torque, seat, check. Torque, seat, check. Good hands. Careful hands.
It’s not till I’m three parts deep into the reassembly, gear oil to my elbows, that it walks up behind me and taps me on the shoulder—the thing I didn’t do. Didn’t even think to do. Didn’t cross my mind once, not at the bench, not reading it twice, not typing back.
Tell Tessa.
I stand there holding a gear in one hand, and down in my gut something shifts, small, like a bolt you didn’t torque right settling loose. I could text her right now. Weird one—an ex reached out, her dad died. Ten seconds.
The grinder screams out back. I put the gear in.