Pete smiled faintly. "I wish you'd said that two weeks ago."
"I wish I'd believed it two weeks ago," Rusty replied.
The mechanics cleaned the work area and covered the parts they had removed. Dave washed his hands until the black lines along his fingernails were merely gray, then folded the dirty towel and put it in the proper bin instead of leaving it wherever he happened to be standing. Pete switched off the bench lamps one by one, pausing over the photograph from Reno that Jim had sent to Rusty's phone. In it, Arthur and Dutch looked like two ordinary men who had shared an extraordinary amount of laughter.
Rusty asked for a printed copy of the photograph. He pinned it beside the inspection notes, not as a talisman but as a reminder that somebody had once created the strange machine with knowledge, mistakes, arguments, and hope. It had not arrived from some mythical workshop fully formed, and it did not deserve to be treated as supernatural simply because its history had been forgotten. Every hidden modification had been made by human hands, and every missing explanation had waited for someone to ask the right question.
When Rusty finally reached home, Denise was sitting on the couch reading. She looked at the time, then at her husband's face, and set the book aside. "You've done all you can tonight," she said.
"I think so."
"That's not an answer."
Rusty sat beside her. "We're ready to try. I know what we found, and I know how we checked it. I also know that if Dutch's bike doesn't run tomorrow, I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what I missed." He studied his hands.
"I spent years believing I was worth whatever problem I could solve. Maybe that's why this one scared me so much."
Denise reached for his hand. "You've made mistakes before, Ray. You apologized and fixed what you could. Your worth was never a single engine turning over, and it won't become one tomorrow." She leaned her head against his shoulder.
"You taught Leo's father to trust this place with his work. Maybe now his son is teaching you to trust other people with yours."
Rusty laughed weakly. "When did you get so good at saying things I don't want to hear?"
"About twenty-eight years ago," she answered. "When I married you."
Across town, Leo's apartment was quiet except for the fan in the kitchen and the sound of Nora folding laundry. Leo sat on the floor with Arthur's photograph beside him, drawing a version of the FXR with more accurate proportions than his earlier attempts. He had copied the shape of the fuel tank and the curve of the handlebars from memory, then sketched a small figure standing beside it. This time the figure wore a beard and a leather vest rather than Arthur's cap.
Nora noticed the change. "Is that Jim?"
Leo nodded. "I think he's going to cry when it starts."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Maybe he'll cry then too," Leo said. "He misses his friend."
Nora sat beside him. She had known plenty of adults who treated grief as an inconvenience that should disappear once enough time had passed, and she was moved by the simplicity of her son's observation. "Whatever happens, you can be kind to him," she said. "But you don't have to make him happy. People have feelings they must learn to carry themselves."