Boone didn't move.
"Dale Haskett," said her grandfather, and his face broke open into a smile Josie had not seen on it in months. "You're late. That Panhead's been on the lift since Tuesday and I'm not doing the top end by myself. Get in here out of the wet, you'll catch your death."
"Tomás," Boone said. His voice came out of somewhere deep and rusty.
"Come in, come in. Is that your truck? What happened to the Chevy?"
Boone looked at Josie. She stood in the rain with her bicycle, and she could not think of a single thing to say. After a second he went up the porch steps, slowly, like a man going up a ladder, and stood in front of her grandfather, who came up to about the middle of his chest.
"Look at you," said Aitona, peering up at him. "Look at you, you got big. You eating? Your mother feeding you?"
"Yes, sir," said Boone.
"Good. Good." Aitona patted his arm. "Coffee's on."
They sat on the porch, the three of them, while the storm walked off east and the gutters gurgled. Aitona did most of the talking. He talked about a Panhead that belonged to somebody named Ernie Basa, and a customer who'd tried to pay for a valve job with a horse, and how the boy—he meant Boone, he kept meaning Boone—had better stop running around with the Murphy brothers, those boys were nothing but trouble. Boone said yes, sir, and no, sir, and I know, Tomás, and held his coffee cup in both of his ruined hands and did not drink from it. Twice Aitona called Josie Kristin, and the second time, Boone looked at her, and she looked away.
When her grandfather finally went inside to lie down, saying the rain made his knees ache, Josie walked Boone back to his truck. Penny watched them through the windshield with her ears up.
"I'm sorry," Josie said. "He gets mixed up about when it is."
"He was right about the Murphy brothers," said Boone.
He leaned his back against the truck door. The air smelled of wet sage and hot asphalt cooling.