* * *
In May, the bank finally sold the cinderblock building on the Wells highway, to a man who paid cash and a woman who co-signed the loan for the rest, and the man and the woman and four other people with circular saws and paint rollers spent every weekend in April making it into a shop again.
The new sign went up on the first Saturday in May. Deacon hung it, from a ladder Tiny held. It said ETCHEVERRY & HASKETT – SMALL ENGINE & CYCLE – SINCE 1984, and below that, in smaller letters that Josie had insisted on, painted by hand: WE LISTEN FIRST.
Deacon was the full-time mechanic now. He had the hands for it and, it turned out, the patience, and he talked to the engines almost as much as Boone did. Boone ran the counter and the parts and did the talking to people, which he was bad at, and the customers came anyway, because word had gotten around about the shop where the old biker and the quiet veteran and the girl worked, and how they found the thing the other shops missed.
Josie came after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and all day on Saturdays, and Marla picked her up at five, and on Sundays they drove out to Ruby Ridge to see Aitona.
Some Sundays he knew her. Some Sundays she was Kristin, and some Sundays she was a nice young lady from the church. But on the first Sunday in May, Boone signed him out for the afternoon and drove him over in the pickup, which ran now because Josie had put the rotor back in, and they set him up in a folding lawn chair in the doorway of the middle bay, in the sun, with a blanket over his knees and a coffee in his hand.
He looked at the bays and the lifts and the pegboard on the wall with every tool's outline painted white behind it, and he didn't say anything for a long while.
"This is a good shop," he said at last.
"It's yours," said Josie. "It's your shop, Aitona."
He frowned at her, puzzled and pleased, like a man handed a present for a birthday that isn't his. Then he looked down at his own hands in his lap.
Boone came out of the office with something in a little leather case. He opened it and held it out to Josie. Inside, on worn green felt, were three center punches, the ones that had hung over Aitona's bench at this same shop for thirty-one years, their handles polished dark with the grease from his fingers.
"Found 'em in a box in his garage when Gus and me were clearing it out," he said. "Figured they were time to go back to work."
That morning Josie had rebuilt the carburetor off the red Sportster for the second time, right this time, with the float level set exactly where it ought to be. It was sitting on the bench on a clean rag, ready to go back on. She took the smallest punch and a hammer, and she turned the carburetor over, and on the flat of the float bowl, where nobody but a mechanic would ever look, she punched three tiny dots in a triangle. Then, very carefully, in the center of the triangle, she punched a fourth.