"Tuesday," Josie said, and got up to start the rice.
* * *
She told herself all week she wasn't going to go.
She had reasons. It was three miles out Lamoille Road, which was nothing on a bike, but it meant leaving Aitona for two hours, maybe three. It meant a stranger knowing her name. It meant the most dangerous man in Cutter Springs, which was what Shelby Raines's mother had called him once at the Fourth of July picnic, said in a low voice as he walked past with a paper plate of potato salad that looked very small in his hand.
But on Saturday morning she got Aitona settled with his coffee and the old Western on Channel 4 that ran from nine to eleven, and she put a sandwich on the side table with plastic wrap over it, and she set the alarm on her steel watch for noon, and at 9:40 she was on her bicycle, riding past the cattle guard and the sign that said HASKETT, NO TRESPASSING, THIS MEANS YOU, which somebody had shot twice.
The blue metal shop stood back from a single-wide trailer with a deck built on the front. There were three motorcycles under a carport, and a horse trailer with weeds growing up through the fenders, and a Border collie who came out to meet her at a dead run and then circled her bicycle twice without barking, considering.
"That's Penny," said Boone from the shop door. "She don't bite. Not kids, anyhow."
He was wearing a gray T-shirt with no sleeves and the same leather vest, and a pair of reading glasses that looked ridiculous on him, and he had a cup of coffee in his good hand. He did not say he was glad she'd come. He did not say anything else at all. He turned around and went into the shop, and after a second Josie leaned her bicycle against the horse trailer and followed.
Inside it was cooler, and dim, and it smelled like every good place she had ever been. Oil and solvent and rubber and dust. The FLH was up on a lift table in the middle of the floor. Along one wall ran a workbench with a pegboard over it, and every tool on the pegboard had its outline painted in white behind it, so you'd know if anything was missing, the way Aitona's used to. A lot of the outlines were empty. There was a calendar on the wall from a parts company in Sparks, and it was turned to October 2018.
On the bench, laid out on a clean rag like surgical instruments, were a new points wire, a new grommet, a new set of points and a new condenser, still in their little cardboard boxes.
"Figured as long as we're in there," Boone said.
"Okay."
"Points are gapped at eighteen thousandths. Feeler gauge is in the drawer. You know how to set them?"