"I said I did everything I know how to do."
"So start it."
Lazaro looked at the boy, and at the boy's mother, who was trying not to smile and almost managing, and at the Shovelhead on its pallet-slat stand. He walked back down the alley. He swung his bad leg over, which hurt, and settled onto the seat, which creaked, and turned the key, and opened the petcock, and set the choke. Then he stood up on the left peg and came down on the kickstarter with his whole weight.
It coughed. It caught. It ran.
It ran rough, and loud, and it shook the coffee cup off Mrs. Vuong's back step, and a cloud of blue smoke rolled up the alley toward Lake Street, and from inside the laundromat, over the roar, he heard Mrs. Vuong shout something in Vietnamese that he was fairly sure was not a blessing. Emi was jumping up and down. Celestina had both hands over her ears and was laughing, actually laughing, for the first time since he'd known her. Lazaro sat on the shaking bike with his tattooed hands on the grips, HOLD and FAST, and let it idle, and listened to it, and did not ride anywhere.
At the mouth of the alley, a young woman pushing a stroller had stopped on the sidewalk, startled by the noise. She looked down the alley at the smoke and the motorcycle and the man on it with the tattoos and the letters down his neck, and Lazaro watched her face do what faces on Lake Street had done for six years. She stepped back toward the curb, toward the other side of the street.
Then she saw the new can, right there beside her at chest height. She read the sign. She read it again, the second line, the one in a child's handwriting.
She stood there for what felt to Lazaro like a long time, with one hand on the stroller and the traffic going by behind her. He did not wave. He did not call out. He had learned that much.
The young woman reached out and took a white box from the can and put it in her coat pocket. She looked down the alley once more, straight at him this time. She didn't smile, and she didn't come any closer.
But she didn't cross the street, either. She stood there a moment longer, as if she were thinking about whether to ask.