"Yes."
"Show me."
She did. She took the cover off again and took the old points out and the condenser, and she routed the new wire through the new grommet so it came out straight, with no kink to rub, and she put a dab of the white grease on the cam the way Aitona had shown her, a dab no bigger than a match head because too much would fling off and foul the points. She rolled the engine over with a wrench on the rear wheel in high gear until the rubbing block sat right on the high point of the cam, and she slid the feeler gauge between the points and tightened the screw and checked it again. Boone stood behind her with his coffee and said nothing, which she understood was the highest compliment available.
Then he said, "Now time it."
That part she knew, but only from the book. Aitona had done it with a test light and a mark on the flywheel he could see through a little window in the case, a plug you pulled out on the left side. She'd watched him a hundred times. She'd never done it herself.
"I've only seen it," she said.
Boone set his coffee down on the bench.
"Then I'll talk," he said, "and you do."
So he talked. He told her where the timing plug was and which mark meant what, the dot and the line, and how to hold the flashlight so the light went in at an angle and the mark wouldn't hide in the shadows. He told her to clip her granddad's test light across the points, key on, and roll the engine forward slow until the light came on, because that was the instant the points opened and the plug would fire, and that moment should come right when the mark lined up in the center of the little window. It didn't, quite. It was a hair late. He told her how to loosen the two screws that held the points plate and rotate the whole plate, just a whisker, against the direction of the cam, and try again.
"Feels like nothing," she said, turning it.
"It is nothing. It's a thirty-second of an inch. That's the whole difference between a motor that runs and a motor that runs right."
It took her four tries. On the fourth, the bulb blinked on just as the line slid into the middle of the window like a sunrise.
She looked up at him. He had his arms crossed over his chest again, and the reading glasses were down at the end of his nose.