The first week of September, the bottom porch step on Pine Street, which had been soft with rot for two years, was suddenly not soft. There was a new step there, raw yellow pine, and Gus Quintero was packing up a circular saw into the back of a white Ford when Josie got home from the first day of seventh grade. He tipped his cap to her and drove off without a word.
The second week, Tiny mowed the yard. He did it with a riding mower he'd brought in on a flatbed trailer from Ruby Lake, sixty miles round trip, to mow a yard that could have been done with a push mower in twenty minutes, and he did it at seven in the morning on a Sunday and waved at Aitona on the porch the whole time.
On Tuesdays, Marla came at four to take Aitona's blood pressure. She said it was a thing she did for a lot of old men in town, a hobby, and Aitona, who had always liked a woman with opinions, let her. She'd wrap the cuff around his skinny arm and they'd argue about the Wolf Pack's offense, and Josie would sit at the kitchen table and do her math homework for a whole hour without listening for the door.
And on Wednesdays, Boone came.
He sat with her grandfather on the porch and they talked about engines. Sometimes Aitona knew it was 2026 and knew that Boone was sixty-three and had a shop of his own, and sometimes Boone was sixteen and late for work. Boone answered whichever one was there. Josie came out once with two glasses of iced tea and heard Boone say, very low, "I never thanked you, Tomás. For the visits. For any of it."
Aitona frowned at him. He was in a clear spell that day; she could tell by the way he held his shoulders.
"Thanked me," he said. "For what? You paid. I've still got the cardboard somewhere." He waved his hand toward town, toward the old shop, toward thirty years. "Paid in full, Dale. Every dollar."
Boone looked at his tea. He nodded a few times, slowly. Then he said that the Wolf Pack's offensive line couldn't block a screen door, and her grandfather laughed so hard he had to take his glasses off.
It was the best September she could remember. She let herself believe, for almost three weeks, that it might keep going.
* * *
The thing that broke it was a field trip form.
The seventh grade was going to the Northeastern Nevada Museum in Elko, and the form needed a parent or guardian signature and an emergency phone number, and Josie signed it Tomás J. Etcheverry, the way she'd signed his checks since she was nine, with the big loop on the T and the tail on the y that went back under the whole name like a shelf. She wrote down the number of the house on Pine Street. It was a good signature. That was the problem. Mrs. Kittredge in the front office had known Tomás Etcheverry for forty years, and she had bought her son's first dirt bike from him in 1989, and she happened to have seen him in September at the Ruby Drug counter, standing very lost in the middle of the aisle holding a box of Band-Aids and asking the pharmacist if they'd moved the store. And she looked at that beautiful confident signature for a long time, and then she picked up the phone and called the number.
Aitona answered. Josie never knew exactly what he said. What Mrs. Kittredge wrote down, in the report she was required by law to make, was that Mr. Etcheverry had told her his granddaughter was four years old and living in Spokane with her mother, and asked if Mrs. Kittredge was calling about the Triumph.