The cut was clean. Whatever was used had been sharp and it ran diagonally across the center of the seat. The leather itself was original, 40 years old, dried to a specific texture that modern leather didn't have that you couldn't replicate with new material because the process of being ridden for 40 years was not something you could manufacture. The stitching along the cuts path had separated and the stuffing beneath showed through, compressed and aged. Menddees, she said.
Ry looked at her. Roberto Menddees, she said, out in Tucson. He does restoration leather, old stuff. I've sent him three seats in the last 2 years. Can he match it?
He can't replace it, she said. But he can repair it in a way that holds the original. He told me once that his job is to make the repair invisible while making the leather strong. She looked at the seat. He's the only person I trust with this.
Call him, Ray said. It's 4: 30. Call him, she called him. Roberto Menddees answered on the second ring. And when she described the seat, the age of the leather, the nature of the cut, he was quiet for a moment and then said, "Bring it to me this weekend.
I want to see it in person before I tell you what's possible. " What if it's not repable? She said. Everything is repairable, Roberto said. The question is whether the repair tells the right story. A pause.
Bring it to me. She hung up. Tucson this weekend, she said to Ry. I'll ride with you, he said. You don't have to, Claire.
He looked at her over his coffee cup. Rudy rode with me when Linda left the first time. He drove 12 hours round trip to sit with me in a parking lot outside a bar in Flagstaff and make sure I didn't do something I couldn't undo. He paused. Tucson is 2 hours.
I'll ride with you. She looked at him. Okay, she said. They worked through the evening, not on everything, not trying to solve the whole bike in one session, but doing what the first session was for, assessing completely, documenting what needed what. making the ordered list that would become the weeks of work ahead. The mirror bracket, the paint on the tank, the seat to Tucson, the fuel line that had a small crack she'd noticed 3 months before the parking lot and had meant to address and hadn't.
The chrome on the exhaust that the parking lot incident had chipped along the lower edge. She cataloged everything. She was good at this, at seeing the whole scope of the damage before beginning, at not flinching from it. Her father had taught her this too. Don't look away from what's broken, he'd said.
Looking away just means you will be surprised later. Look straight at it. Know exactly what you're dealing with. Then start. She looked straight at it.
She knew exactly. Then she started. 3 weeks later, Roberto Menddees called her on a Tuesday. "Come get your seat, " he said. She drove to Tucson alone early before the shop opened.
Ry had offered. Marcus had offered Daniel, who had in the past month begun showing up to the shop on weekends voluntarily without being asked to work on his own with a manual and whatever project Clare left accessible, had offered to come along in the way young people offer things when they want to be part of something without quite knowing how to say that she went alone. Roberto's shop was small and specific. the shop of a man who had spent his life doing one thing with the kind of depth that turns a skill into an art. He had the seat on the workbench when she arrived, and he stepped back when she came in, the way craftsmen do when they are presenting something they know is right and want the other person to see it without their voice in the way. She stood in front of it.
The repair was there. She could see it, not because it was obvious, but because she knew the seat well enough to see the seam line that hadn't been there before. the specific shade of the thread that was a near match but not a perfect match. The slight difference in surface texture where the new work met the old. But the leather was whole. It was the same leather, the same 40 years.
The same stitching her father had put in himself along the edges, untouched, still holding. The cut was closed. The seat was not as it was the night of the parking lot. It was as it was before the parking lot. with one addition, a repair that told the story of what had happened to it and had been survived. She ran her finger along the repair line.
"The thread is as close as I could get, " Roberto said. "The original thread is a waxed cotton that hasn't been manufactured in 20 years. I have a supplier in New Mexico who finds old stock. " "It's right, " she said. "It's honest, " he said. "It doesn't pretend the damage didn't happen.
It shows that the damage was addressed. " She looked at it for a long moment. Roberto, she said, "What do I owe you? " He told her a number that was less than she expected. She looked at him. "My grandfather was a veteran, " he said. "He didn't have anybody like you when he came back. " He turned away back to his bench.
"Take it, she took it. " She drove back to Phoenix with her father's seat on the passenger seat of her truck, buckled in with a seat belt because she was not taking any chances. and she talked to it the way people talk to things that carry the people they've lost. She said the things she hadn't gotten to say enough when he was alive. Not the dramatic things, not the speeches, but the ordinary things, the day-to-day accumulation of a daughter and a father. All the small dailies that stop when someone is gone and that you miss more than the large moments because the large moments are finite and the small ones were supposed to go on forever. She told him about the parking lot.
She told him about Rey and the 51 bikes. She told him about Gerald Fitch and Sandra Kellerman and a retired Marine colonel she'd never met who had read Brandon Delqua's words and told a board to fund something important. She told him about Daniel Reeves, who had arrived on a Monday at 6: 52, 3 minutes before Deloqua, and who had started without being asked, reading her father's copy of the Harley-Davidson factory service manual that she kept on the shop shelf because he wanted to understand the bike from the beginning. She said, "Dad, there's a kid in my shop who showed up to break something and started wanting to understand it instead. I think you would have liked him. " She said, "The seat is fixed.
Roberto fixed it. You can still see where it was cut. I'm going to keep it that way. She said, "I think that's right, don't you? " Keeping the repair visible, so it's part of the story instead of hidden underneath it. She drove through the October desert and the light was the kind of light that happens in that part of the country, in that part of the year.