"Go on, then," he said.
She pedaled home with eighty-nine dollars in her pocket and the three dots going around in her head. She didn't see Boone Haskett walk out to the end of his drive and stand by the shot-up sign and watch her until she was a speck on Lamoille Road. He stood there a long time after, with Penny sitting against his leg, looking west toward town.
* * *
By the end of August she had been to the blue shop four Saturdays running, and she had learned that Boone Haskett talked to engines more than he talked to people, and that he was much nicer to the engines.
The second Saturday it was a 1994 Sportster, red, the one from the calendar. It had been sitting under a tarp in the back of the shop for four years, and the gas in its carburetor had turned to something like varnish that smelled like a dead cat. Boone did not say whose bike it was. Josie took the carburetor apart on a cookie sheet and soaked the jets in a coffee can of cleaner and poked the tiny holes clear with a single strand of copper wire pulled from an old lamp cord, because Aitona said you never put a drill bit or a pin in a jet, that was how amateurs ruined them. When she put it back together and the Sportster fired on the third kick, Boone walked out of the shop and stood in the yard with his back to her for a few minutes. When he came back in he said, "Float level's a hair high, she's running rich," in a perfectly ordinary voice, and his eyes were red, and neither of them mentioned it.
Later she found the photograph on the shelf above the parts washer. A woman with a gray ponytail and a big laugh, sitting on the red Sportster in front of the Lamoille Canyon sign, giving the camera the finger.
"Lorraine," Boone said, when he saw her looking. "My wife. She'd have liked you. She'd have taught you a lot of words I won't."
"What happened to her?"
"Lungs," he said. "Forty years of Marlboros. I quit the day she was diagnosed. Too late to do her any good." He took the photo off the shelf, looked at it, and put it back exactly where it had been, square to the edge. "That was 2019. Year after I closed. Some years just come at you."
The third Saturday, other people came.
Josie heard them before she saw them, the rolling thunder of three big V-twins coming up Lamoille Road, and she went stiff over the Sportster's rear brake caliper. Penny got up and went out wagging. Boone didn't even look up.
"That's just the Ruby Iron," he said. "Don't let 'em scare you. They're mostly retired."
The Ruby Iron Motorcycle Club, it turned out, was eleven people, and the four who came that morning were a short woman with silver hair cut close to her head and forearms like a farrier, riding a pearl-white Road King; her husband, a quiet round man named Gus with a Union Pacific belt buckle; a giant called Tiny who ran cows out by Ruby Lake and had to duck to come through the shop door; and a young man, younger than the others by twenty years, with a shaved head and a careful way of standing near walls, whom everybody called Deacon.