Page 120 of Roadrunner

We sat on the steps in the April morning and watched a man teach his son the bones of a machine he’d been waiting years to build.

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.