"That's it," Boone said. "That's timed."
They put the cover back on. He made her check the gap again first, because the points could move when you tightened the plate. She checked it, and it hadn't moved, and she tightened the screws on the little cover and he said, "Not too hard, they're the kind that strip," and she said, "I know," and he made a sound that was nearly a laugh.
Afterward she wiped her hands on a rag he gave her and walked around the bike, looking at it now that she had the time to look properly. Somebody had taken care of this machine for a long while and then had stopped. The chrome on the primary cover was pitted. The paint on the tank was original, she thought, with a crack in the clear coat near the filler cap. On the left side of the engine, below the front cylinder, was the pad on the crankcase where the factory stamped the engine number, and she squatted down to read it because Aitona always read the numbers first, before he even said hello to a bike.
Next to the numbers, very small, someone had punched three dots into the metal with a center punch. They made a little triangle, each dot the size of a pinhead.
Josie went still.
She knew those dots. She had seen them on Aitona's own lawn mower, on the Briggs & Stratton engine of the old go-kart in the shed, on the bottom of every carburetor and every cylinder he had ever rebuilt. Three dots. One for my father, he had told her, one for my mother, and one for me. So I always know my own work, even after it leaves.
She stood up too fast and her knee knocked the lift table.
"You alright?"
"Who built this engine?"
Boone had picked his coffee back up. He looked at her over the rim of the cup for a while before he answered, and she couldn't read anything at all in his face.
"Fella I used to work for," he said. "Long time ago."
"Here? In Cutter Springs?"
"Out on the Wells highway." He drank. "Why?"