The food kept coming, and the coffee kept coming, and the morning stretched out in that unhurried way that Saturday mornings are supposed to stretch, when there is nowhere urgent to be. Leo ate with his mother, and then he ate a little more with Tank, who insisted that a growing boy needed a second helping of potatoes, and Leo, who was no longer a boy who had to count every bite, accepted, because Tank was right and because the potatoes were good. He wiped a table when someone left, without being asked, because that was his job now, and because he liked the feeling of a table going from used to clean under his hands. He refilled the sugar shaker. He carried a plate back to the kitchen, carefully, two hands, the way Big Joe had shown him, though Big Joe had not really shown him, he had just done it, and Leo had watched.
Near the end of the morning, when the crowd had thinned a little and the light had moved higher in the windows, Marty stood up. He did not climb on a chair. He did not call for silence. He just stood at the counter with his mug in his hand, and the room quieted on its own, the way rooms do when someone they trust is about to speak. Marty looked around, at the neighbours and the brothers and Diane and Leo, and he raised his mug, not high, just to the level of his chest, and he said, "To people who come back in the morning."
It was not a long toast. It did not need to be. People raised their mugs, and their glasses of juice, and one child raised a milk carton, and the room said the words back in a murmur, or nodded, or just lifted, and Leo lifted his own glass of orange juice, and he looked at Reaper at the window table, and Reaper lifted his cold coffee, and their eyes met across the room, and Reaper nodded, once, the way he nodded when something was settled. Leo nodded back. The breakfast was over, in the way that good things are over, which is to say it was finished but it stayed in the room a little longer, in the smell of coffee and the sound of chairs being pushed back and the paper taped to the jar, with its honest, growing number, still there for anyone to read.
After the breakfast, when the tables had been wiped and the jar had been counted and put away safely in Marty's office, Reaper asked Leo to come outside with him to the lot. He did not make a ceremony of it. He just said, "Leo. Come here a minute," in the same voice he used for everything, which was gruff on the outside and steady underneath, and Leo followed him out into the morning light, which was brighter now, and warmer, and full of the ordinary sounds of a Saturday: a car door, a dog barking somewhere down the road, a screen door sighing shut.
Reaper stood beside his Panhead, which was parked in its usual place, in the shade of the awning's edge, and he took something from his saddlebag. It was wrapped in a clean cloth, and he unwrapped it slowly, the way a man unwraps something he has chosen carefully, and inside was a rag. It was not the rag Leo had used all summer, which was frayed at the edges and had been washed so many times that it was thin in the middle, like a favourite shirt. This rag was new, and clean, and soft, and folded into a neat square, and beside it, in the same wrapping, was a small chrome polish kit: a tin of polish, a smaller cloth for buffing, and a little brush for getting into the places where dust liked to hide. It was not an expensive kit. Leo could tell that it had not cost a great deal of money. But it was his, and it was complete, and it had been chosen for him, and that made it worth more than anything expensive would have been.
Reaper held it out, and Leo took it with both hands, because that seemed like the right way to take a thing like that, and he looked at it for a long time, turning the tin over in his fingers, feeling the weight of it, smelling faintly the clean, sharp smell of the polish inside, even through the closed lid. He did not know what to say. He wanted to say something big, something that would match how he felt, but the big words crowded in his throat and would not come out in the right order, and so he said the truest small thing he could find, which was, "Thank you, Reaper." Reaper nodded, and he put a hand, briefly, on Leo's shoulder, and the hand was heavy and warm through Leo's shirt, and then he took it away again, because Reaper was not a man who lingered over gestures, but the gesture had been made, and Leo felt it stay.
The best shine, Reaper said, "comes from patience, not pressure." He said it slowly, as if he were saying something he had learned the hard way, and wanted Leo to learn it the easier way, if that were possible. "You press too hard, you scratch it. You rush it, you miss the dust in the corners. You go slow, you go steady, you let the cloth do the work, and the chrome will tell you when it's ready. It'll catch the light, and you'll know."