By noon, sweat had soaked through my shirt. The overhead fan moved hot air from one end of the garage to the other without cooling much of anything. I ate two crackers from an emergency package in my toolbox and drank water from a bottle I kept in the office refrigerator. I had the uneasy feeling that the entire morning was being consumed by things other people had already examined.
I heard Hector's voice in my mind, not as some mystical visitation but as the memory of a thousand ordinary afternoons. "Don't let the clock make you stupid, Caleb. A fast mistake costs more time than a careful answer."
The memory brought back a day when I was thirteen and a neighbor's lawn tractor had refused to run beyond a few minutes. I had declared the carburetor guilty after seeing a little sediment in the bowl. Hector told me to test my theory, and I was too impatient to listen. I spent half a day cleaning and rebuilding a carburetor that was not broken, only to discover a damaged ignition wire behind a panel I'd never considered removing.
He didn't mock me, which was one of the things that made his lessons hard to forget. He handed me a rag and said, "What did you learn?" I told him I had wasted six hours. He shook his head. "You learned six hours of how not to think. Don't waste that by pretending you didn't."
The Knucklehead deserved a better version of me than the boy who had blamed the first dirty part he saw. I put the carburetor back in place, verified that nothing was left loose, and sat on the edge of the workbench reviewing what I knew. The failure appeared after sustained vibration and heat, not while idling and not under an ordinary load. That narrowed the possibilities, but it did not close them.
At twelve thirty, Mrs. Patton arrived in her battered pickup. She was a retired schoolteacher in her seventies, with a silver braid down the back of her neck and a reputation for making grown men apologize without ever raising her voice. Her truck had been waiting on a wheel bearing for two weeks. She looked at the motorcycle, then at the expression on my face.
"That's an expensive kind of headache," she said.
"It might be."
"Have you eaten?"
"Some crackers."
"That wasn't the question."
She handed me a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Then she stood with her hands on her hips and looked at the red Harley as if it were a disruptive student.
"Your uncle used to say the machines with the nicest paint were the ones you couldn't trust until you'd checked their insides," she said.
I smiled despite myself. "He said that about cars."
"He said it about my first husband, too. He was right in both cases."
For a moment, laughter loosened the knot behind my ribs. Mrs. Patton glanced toward the office, where the blue envelope from the bank was visible in the open drawer. She didn't ask about it. She had been in the neighborhood long enough to know that dignity sometimes depended on what you chose not to mention.