"I was sixteen," he said, after a while. "My old man was a drunk and a mean one, and I was on my way to being both. Your granddad caught me trying to steal a carburetor off a Triumph out of his scrap pile. One in the morning. Shined a flashlight right in my face. I figured he was gonna call the sheriff. Instead he asked me did I know how to take it off without busting the float bowl. I said no. He said, then you'd better come back tomorrow at eight and I'll show you." Boone shook his head. "So I came back. Seven years I worked for him. He built that engine for me in eighty-four. Sold me the whole bike for four hundred a month, and if I came up short he'd just write the short on a piece of cardboard and tack it to the wall."
"The three dots," Josie said.
"Yeah. I knew them soon as I saw your face when you found 'em."
He looked down the street, toward where the Wells highway ran out of town past the old shop.
"In ninety-one I hurt a man real bad," he said. "Outside the Gold Dust. He'd put his hands on a girl I was with. That ain't an excuse. I'd have done it anyway, I think, that's who I was. Broke his jaw and his eye socket and I'd have kept going if Ernie Basa hadn't sat on me. Did twenty-six months in Carson City." He breathed out through his nose. "That's three hundred miles from here. You know who drove it, every single month?"
Josie knew.
"Every month. Twenty-six times. Never missed. Sat across that table and talked about carburetors. Brought me manuals. Never said one word about what I'd done, not one, except the first time. First time, he said, Dale, a man is not the worst thing he ever did, but he's got to work every day so that's true." Boone stopped. He took his cap off, wiped the rain off his head with his forearm, put it back on. "I got out, I was ashamed to go back to him. Took a job in Elko. Then I opened my own place, right here in this town, three miles from his. Took some of his customers. He never said a word against me. Not to anybody. And I never once went back and thanked that man." His voice cracked down the middle like dry wood. "And now he thinks I'm sixteen."
Josie didn't say anything. There wasn't anything that would have been big enough.
Boone looked at the house. At the porch. At the hook-and-eye up at the top of the door frame, which you could see from here if you knew to look, and he was a man who knew to look.
"Josie," he said. "Who else lives here?"
"Just us."
"Your mom?"
"She's in Spokane. Or she was. She sends a card on my birthday sometimes." She said it flat, like reading from a page. "I haven't seen her since I was four."