Frank says you pay, Pete said. "Frank says you work. I say you learn. So you'll come here on Saturdays, and you'll sweep, and you'll hold tools, and you'll learn the names of parts, and you'll watch how a bike is put right. You won't touch this one until I say so. You'll watch. Watching is a kind of work too."
Cody nodded. He wanted to say something clever, something that would make the morning easier, but nothing clever came. What came was quieter and truer, and it surprised him. "I'm sorry," he said, to Pete, and to the bike, and to the empty shop, and he meant it in a way he had not meant it in the parking lot, when the words had been a performance for Frank and the officer.
Pete looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, as if accepting a delivery that was not yet complete. "Sorry is a start," he said. "Work is the rest of it. Come Saturday. Eight o'clock. Don't be late. And Cody —" He paused. "Daniel would have talked to you. He was that kind of man. He would have asked you about your bike, and meant it. Remember that, when you're sweeping."
Before Cody left, Pete called him to the back wall, where a row of photographs hung in cheap frames, blackened a little by years of shop dust. Pete pointed to one in the middle, a faded print of a younger Daniel Hart beside the Heritage on a summer day, smiling as if the photographer had just told him a joke. "That's the wall," Pete said. "Men who brought their bikes here and kept them right. Your brother's picture could have been there, Cody, if he'd lived to bring his bike in. That's not your fault. But this bike is here, and it needs a man to put it right, and you've been given that job. Don't waste it." Cody looked at the photograph for a long time, and he thought about the picture on his own phone, his brother grinning on a borrowed bike, and he felt the two images sit side by side in his chest without cancelling each other out. Cody left the shop with the rag still in his hand. Outside, the morning was bright and ordinary, and he stood for a moment beside his own motorcycle and did not get on it. He looked back through the shop window at the Heritage on the lift, black and patient under the hard light, and he thought about his brother, and about the photograph on his phone, and about all the old riders he had been angry at for surviving, and he understood that he had not been angry at Evelyn's bike at all. He had been angry at time, and at loss. It was not an excuse. Pete had made that clear. But it was a beginning, and beginnings were quieter than he had expected.
Saturday came in grey and cold, with a wind that found every gap in Pete's old shop door, and Cody Reyes arrived at eight o'clock exactly, which surprised Pete and surprised Cody almost as much. He wore jeans and a plain work shirt and boots that were already scuffed, and he carried nothing, because he had not known what to bring, and Pete, who had seen a hundred young men arrive at his shop with the wrong tools and the wrong attitude, gave him a broom without ceremony and pointed at the floor.
Sweep, Pete said. "Every corner. Under the benches. Around the lift. A shop floor tells you everything about the man who works in it."
Cody swept. It was not glamorous work. Dust rose in the cold light. Old washers and screws and bits of rubber gathered in a small, glittering pile. He swept around the Heritage, which sat on the lift with its tank now removed and waiting, and he was careful not to bump it, more careful than he had ever been with anything in his life. Luis Vega arrived an hour later, quieter than usual, carrying two cups of coffee from the diner down the street, and he set one down for Pete and one for Cody, and then he picked up a second broom without being asked, and the two young men swept in a silence that was not unfriendly, only unfamiliar.
Jake Miller came at ten, with his phone in his hand and his face tight, and Pete looked at him and said, "If you're going to film something, film yourself deleting that video." Jake flushed. He had filmed the mocking for weeks, and the trashing on Friday, and the laughter had sounded good on his phone and terrible in his memory. He stood in the middle of the shop, in front of Pete and Luis and Cody, and he opened his phone, and he found the videos, one by one, and he deleted them, slowly, while Pete watched, and when the last one was gone he held the phone up to show the empty folder, and he said, "It's done," and his voice was steadier than he had expected.
Good, Pete said. "Now you can work."
He gave Jake a rag and a bucket and set him to cleaning the bench. He gave Luis a wrench and showed him how to hold a bolt steady while Pete turned the nut, and Luis, who had always been the quietest of the group, proved to have steady hands and a patience that surprised even himself. Cody watched, and then Pete called him over, and put a socket in his hand, and named it, and named the bolt it fitted, and named the part it held, and Cody repeated the names back, slowly, like a boy learning a language he had pretended to know.