I'm sorry, Evelyn, Murphy said. "The camera doesn't reach that corner properly. I've been meaning to move it for a year. I never did."
It's all right, Evelyn said, and meant it, because anger at Murphy would have been anger at the wrong person, and she had never been good at wasting anger.
The next morning was Saturday, and Evelyn rode the Heritage to Pete's Cycle Works, the repair shop Daniel had used for twenty years, a low building with a wall of photographs and a smell of oil and clean metal. Pete Kowalski was sixty-one, broad-handed, with honest prices and a way of looking at a motorcycle as if it were a patient telling him where it hurt. He came out when he heard the engine, wiped his hands on a rag, and looked at the scratch, and then at Evelyn, and he did not say anything foolish, like asking whether she was sure it was new.
Can it be polished out? Evelyn asked.
Mostly, Pete said. "Not all the way. The paint's lifted. I can feather it, blend it, make it hard to see unless you know where to look. But you'll know. You'll always know where it is."
Evelyn nodded. She had expected that. She had expected, too, the way Pete looked at the bike, not as a machine, but as something with a history, and she was grateful for it, because most people looked at old things and saw only their age.
Leave it with me? Pete asked.
No, Evelyn said. "I'll do it myself. At home. Slowly. The way Daniel did."
Pete nodded, as if that were the answer he had expected, and he gave her a small tin of polish and a clean cloth, and refused to take money for them, and walked her out to the lot, and stood watching while she started the bike, first try, and rode away.
At home she worked on the scratch for two hours, polishing in small circles, the way Daniel had. The scratch grew fainter, but it did not disappear, and she knew she would always know where it was. She worked until her arms ached, and felt a resolve, quiet and steady, settling in her chest.
She did not accuse anyone. She did not go to Cody's table the next Friday and demand an answer. She did not tell Grace, except to say, when Grace asked about the scratch, that it had happened, and that she had photographed it, and that Murphy's camera had not caught it. Grace looked at her for a long moment, and then nodded, and did not press her, because Grace knew that Evelyn, when she was ready to act, would act, and that pressing her before she was ready was a waste of both their time.
That night Evelyn rode home from the garage in the dark, and the Heritage ran steady under her, and the scratch, faint now, caught the streetlight once, a thin bright line, and then was gone, and she thought about Daniel, and about the Pacific, and about a cracked helmet visor, and about how a scratch, like a grief, does not have to disappear to be lived with. It only has to be tended, and named, and not allowed to win.
The shop was at the end of a quiet street, in a building that had once been a garage for delivery trucks, with a sign over the door that said MERCER'S in plain painted letters, faded by sun and rain. Evelyn had driven past it a hundred times over the years, in Daniel's lifetime and after it, and she had never once stopped, although she knew, from Daniel's stories, exactly who worked inside it, and exactly what it meant to him. On the Saturday after the scratch, she parked the Heritage in front of it, switched off the engine, and sat for a moment with her hands on the handlebars, listening to the tick of cooling metal, gathering herself the way she gathered herself before a difficult conversation at the office.
The door was open. Inside, the air smelled of oil and coffee and clean metal, and the light fell in from high windows onto a concrete floor swept clean. A motorcycle stood on a lift in the centre of the room, half taken apart, its parts laid out on a cloth in a neat row, each one in its place, the way Daniel had laid out his tools. A workbench ran along one wall, with photographs pinned above it, men on motorcycles, men laughing, men with their arms around each other's shoulders, in places Evelyn recognised and places she did not. And at the bench, with his back to the door, stood a man with a grey beard, broad shoulders, and hands that moved with the slow certainty of a man who had done a thing ten thousand times.
Frank, Evelyn said.
He turned. Frank Mercer was sixty-six, president of the Iron Saints, Daniel Hart's oldest riding friend, and he had the kind of face that settled a room without trying. His beard was grey, his eyes were steady, and when he saw her, standing in his doorway with her helmet under her arm, his whole face changed, the way a face changes when it sees someone it has been expecting for a long time and has not wanted to hurry.
Evelyn, he said. He wiped his hands on a rag and came toward her, and he did not hug her, because Frank Mercer was not a man who hugged people he had not seen in a while, but he took her hand in both of his, and held it for a moment, and that was enough. "Come in. Coffee's on."