He rode his bicycle home from school most days, along the road from town to the trailer park, past the diner, where he would sometimes stop to wave at Marty, and past the open ground where the Harleys had parked, which was empty now, and ordinary, and which Leo passed without stopping, because it was just ground now, and ground does not need to be remembered every day, only sometimes, when the light is right, and the memory comes back on its own, gentle, not sharp. One afternoon, a friend asked him why he always stopped at the diner, and Leo said, because Marty kept a pencil jar for him, and because the window table was good for homework, and because his mother liked to sit there with coffee, and the friend nodded, as if those were perfectly good reasons, which they were, and they rode on together, and Leo felt, in that small exchange, that his life made sense to other people now, not just to himself, and that being understood, even in small things, was a kind of belonging he had not known he was missing until it arrived. He rode with his friends sometimes, in a loose, laughing line, and they raced, in the way boys race, which is to say not really racing at all, but riding fast and shouting, and Leo's bicycle, repaired by Wrench, kept up, its chain oiled, its wheels true, and Leo, riding it, felt the wind in his face, and the road under his wheels, and the simple, boyish joy of going fast enough to feel free, but not so fast that he was afraid, and he laughed, and his friends laughed, and the road, for that stretch, belonged to them, in the way roads belong to boys on bicycles, for a little while, on autumn afternoons.
He scraped his knee, one afternoon, falling off that bicycle on a gravel turn, and he came home limping and brave, trying not to cry, and his mother treated it the way mothers treat scraped knees, which is to say with water and a clean cloth and a bandage and a few words that made it hurt less, even though the words themselves had no medicine in them. Leo sat on the trailer steps while she worked, and he told her, in great detail, exactly how he had fallen, and exactly how fast he had been going, and exactly how the gravel had looked as it came up to meet him, and she listened, and she nodded, and she said, "Well, you'll know that turn next time," and Leo agreed, because he would, and because knowing a turn is a kind of growing up that does not hurt, even when the knee does.
His homework, in those weeks, was ordinary homework, and that was the point. He wrote paragraphs, and he did sums, and he read chapters, and he complained about the chapters sometimes, in the way boys complain about homework, which is a luxury that Leo had not had in July, when homework had seemed very far away, behind hunger and worry. He laughed, too, more than he had laughed in a long time, at jokes his friends told, at something Marty said, at the way Big Joe tried to be serious and failed, because Big Joe's face was not made for seriousness, no matter how hard he tried. The laughter came easily now, and it did not catch in his throat, and it did not turn into anything else, and Leo, hearing himself laugh, sometimes felt surprised, as if he were hearing someone else, and then he realised it was himself, and he laughed a little more.
One afternoon, in the diner lot, Leo told Reaper, plainly, what he had been thinking for a while, ever since Wrench had shown him how a machine worked, and ever since he had polished the Panhead's chrome and watched it shine. "I want to be a mechanic one day," he said. He said it without bragging, and without apologising, the way you say a true thing that you have thought about for a long time. Reaper listened, the way Reaper listened to everything Leo said, which was fully, without interrupting, and without looking away, and then he said, "Mechanics start by listening to machines, not forcing them." He said it the way he had said, "Patience, not pressure," as if the two sayings belonged together, which they did, because they were both about the same thing: that you do not get the best out of a thing by bullying it, but by paying attention to it, and by waiting for it to tell you what it needs.
Leo thought about that, and he nodded, and he said, "Listening, not forcing," back to Reaper, the way he had said the other saying back, as a promise to remember. Reaper nodded, once, and Leo felt, as he had felt with the rag, that he had been given something, not a thing you could hold, but a way of doing things, which was better, because a way of doing things stays with you when things you can hold wear out. He went back to his bicycle, and he listened to it as he rode, to the chain and the wheels and the brakes, and he heard, for the first time, what it was telling him, which was that it needed oil on the chain, and he oiled it, carefully, and it rode better, and Leo smiled, not because anyone was watching, but because the work was good, and because he had listened, and the machine had answered.