The young man with the cracked phone looked down at his stopwatch. Four minutes and fifty-one seconds. He blinked, checked it again, and raised the screen so everybody could see. The numbers stayed where they were, indifferent to whether anybody believed them.
"Four fifty-one!" he shouted. "He did it in four fifty-one!"
No one cheered immediately. A few people looked at the phone and then at the machine, as though the two forms of evidence had no business agreeing. Nolan stared at the carburetor. Dale's assistant pressed his hand over his mouth. Curtis stood motionless, the calculations behind his earlier estimate collapsing without the courtesy of a warning.
Then a woman by the fence began clapping. She was the same woman who had lowered her phone while Owen rescued the library book. Her hands struck together hesitantly at first, as though she were uncertain she had earned the right to applaud after standing silent through the insults. A man beside her joined in, then several more, until the sound spread through the lot and overcame the last sputter of mocking laughter.
Within seconds almost everyone was applauding. A teenager who had been laughing at Owen's shoes began shouting his name. One of the older spectators removed his cap and held it against his chest, not because he thought he had witnessed magic, but because he understood the value of work that would otherwise have been ignored. Phones swung between Owen and Garrett, searching for the reaction that would make the best clip.
Owen barely heard them. He was listening to Black Fury's idle, checking for irregularities that might suggest an incomplete repair. The sound remained steady. He let himself breathe, felt the pain in his knees where they had struck the pavement, and realized he had won.
Garrett remained on the motorcycle. His hands were white around the grips, though he was no longer holding them tightly enough to control anything. Beneath him was the sound of his father, or as close to that sound as he had ever allowed himself to imagine. For three days he had feared the machine was gone forever, and in the middle of an act of cruelty the thing he was afraid of losing had been given back to him.
He could remember Walter laughing in the garage, a rare unguarded laugh, when the engine first came together decades earlier. The memory arrived without permission and almost undid him. Garrett closed his eyes briefly, fighting an emotion he could not comfortably name. When he opened them again, Owen was standing beside the toolbox, waiting quietly, neither smiling nor taking a victory lap.