The presents were modest and exactly right. Ellen gave him a new jacket, dark blue, his size, not second-hand, and Leon held it up against himself and felt something warm and complicated rise in his chest, because his mother had worked long hours for that jacket and he knew it. Doc gave him a small toolbox, red, with his initials painted on the side in white, and inside it a set of wrenches that were his own, not borrowed from the garage wall. Sparky gave him a bicycle pump and a patch kit, which made everyone laugh, because Sparky's gifts always came with a job attached, and Leon laughed hardest of all. Deacon gave him a book about engines, thick and serious, with diagrams Leon could already half-read from his months in the garage. Iron gave him nothing wrapped at all. He simply stood beside Leon for a moment, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, "Thirteen looks good on you, kid." Leon felt that gift land somewhere deeper than the others, and he did not have words for why, so he just nodded, and Iron nodded back, and that was enough.
By late afternoon the balloons had started to sag in the heat, and the streamers fluttered loose from one fence post, and the party had settled into that comfortable, tired shape that good parties take when everyone has eaten too much and no one wants to leave yet. Ellen brought out the cake, a chocolate cake with thirteen candles crowded onto the top, the flames trembling in the light wind off the lot. Everyone gathered around the table, and someone — Sparky, of course — started singing, off-key and loud, and everyone joined in, even Deacon, even Iron, even Ms. Ruiz, and Leon stood there with his face going red and his eyes stinging a little, and he laughed at himself for it. He leaned over the cake, and for one moment he thought hard about what to wish for, the way he had every year of his life, always wishing for something he did not have: for the stutter to go away, for the bullies to stop, for his mother to be home more, for a father he had never known to walk through the door.
Then he looked around the table, at his mother with frosting on her finger, at Doc smiling quietly, at Sparky holding a paper plate like a shield, at Deacon and Iron standing shoulder to shoulder, at Tyler lingering at the edge with a shy smile, and he realized, with a clarity that surprised him, that he did not need to wish for any of those things anymore. The stutter was still his, and it was fine. The bullies had stopped, or been stopped. His mother was home more evenings than not. And the men around this table were not a replacement for anything, but they were something real, something his. So when he blew out the candles, all thirteen of them going out in one long breath, he wished, silently, for nothing he did not already have.
The summer after his thirteenth birthday, Leon worked in the garage. That was the arrangement, worked out between Ellen and Iron and Sparky over the kitchen table one evening in June, with Leon sitting in on the discussion like a junior partner in his own life, which was a new feeling and one he liked. He would come to the clubhouse three afternoons a week, after his summer-school reading class, and he would work supervised shifts: sweeping, handing tools, holding the light, learning the names of parts and the order of jobs, and he would be paid a small wage for it, real money in an envelope, because Sparky insisted that work without pay was just chores, and Leon was doing real work. Ellen had agreed on two conditions: no work near the big bikes' engines while they were running, and home by six for supper. Sparky had agreed to both without argument, and Iron had nodded, and that was that.
Leon loved the work the way he had never loved schoolwork, which is to say he loved it with his hands. He learned the difference between a wrench and a socket by weight and by feel, and he learned to tell when a bolt was tight enough and when it was about to strip, and he learned to hold a flashlight steady for a long time without letting his arm shake, which was harder than it sounded and which Sparky praised him for more than anything else. "A steady light is worth more than a fast hand," Sparky said, more than once, and Leon took it to heart, because Sparky did not hand out praise the way some adults did, like candy, but the way a man hands out tools, only when they are needed and only the right one. Doc taught him the other half of garage work, the part that was not about machines at all: how to keep a workspace clean so nobody tripped, how to label a jar of bolts so the next man could find what he needed, how to write down what you had done on a job card so that the work could be checked. "A shop runs on memory," Doc said. "Write it down, and the shop remembers even when you're tired."
The money went into a coffee can in Leon's bedroom, a can his mother had washed out and labeled with tape. He had a goal, and the goal had a shape in his mind, bright and specific: a bicycle of his own, not second-hand, not borrowed, not handed down, but bought with money he had earned. He had wanted a bicycle for as long as he could remember, but wanting had always felt like something that happened to other kids, kids whose parents could walk into a store and buy one on a Saturday. Now,