She slept through the whole thing. She said good. Will said she's going to ask me tomorrow why the motorcycles left. Emily said, "What do I tell her?" Tell her Will's friends had to go home.
He said. Emily looked at him. Is that what's happening? They're leaving tomorrow morning. Will said they can't stay, Emily.
That's not He paused, finding the right words. That's not what this was. They came because something needed doing and it's done. They have their own lives in their own places. She nodded slowly.
And you," she said. "I live here." He said, "I've lived here for 4 years and I'm going to keep living here." Something shifted in her expression. A relief so genuine it was almost painful to watch the specific relief of someone who didn't know how afraid they'd been of a particular outcome until the outcome didn't happen.
"Okay," she said. Just that one word carrying everything. "Okay," he said back. Maggie stirred against her mother's side shifted, settled again. Her coloring book had slid slightly on the table, and Will straightened it with one hand without thinking about it.
The small automatic care of someone who had been part of this child's Wednesdays for 2 years. He looked at his hands. Grease still in the knuckle lines the permanent occupational stain of a man who worked with his hands, who had always worked with his hands, who had found in the physics of broken machines made whole a kind of order that the rest of life frequently didn't offer. You said you'd tell me, Emily said. When it was done.
I said that. He agreed. So tell me, she said, not the whole thing tonight. I know you're tired and I know Maggie's asleep and none of this is the right moment for a long conversation. She looked at him directly, but tell me one thing.
Tell me one thing that I don't know. Will thought about it. He thought about what to say. What first piece of 22 years of a previous life could be offered in the diner on a Sunday night after the thing that had happened? What would be true and manageable and honest?
Jimmy Puit, he said, the man I lost, the reason I left. He looked at the table. His daughter lives in Bosezeman now. She's 28. Her name is Dana and she works at a veterinary clinic and she has his same way of laughing, the kind that starts quiet and builds.
I've known where she is for 4 years. I've been to Boseman once on a parts run and I drove past the clinic, but I didn't stop. He looked up. I've been meaning to stop. Emily held his eyes.
Why haven't you? Because stopping means explaining, he said, who I was to her father, what happened, why I left, and what the leaving cost. He held her gaze. Tonight, I think I'm going to stop next time. Emily was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, "I think that's the right call." Yeah, Will said. I think so, too. Marcus found Will at the workbench at 9:30 that night. The diner had begun to thin out around 9:00 as the immediate adrenaline of the evening settled into something people could take home with them and process in their own kitchens.
Tommy and Carolyn left together Carolyn's hand in Tommy's arm in the way of couples who have been married long enough to communicate through contact. Lou left at 8:40 with his phone to his ear. Again, his wife's voice audible and emphatic even from across the room. Emily left at 9:00 with Maggie carried against her shoulder, the child still asleep, her coloring book and her two horses tucked under Emily's free arm because Emily Parker did not leave things behind. Will had walked her to the car.
He'd helped her get Maggie into the car seat, the practiced hands of someone who'd been enlisted for this task before on the Wednesdays. When Maggie was tired and Emily had buckled the straps and straightened up and stood in the cold parking lot and looked at him for a moment. Come for coffee in the morning, she said. Not the diner, my kitchen. 7:00.
I'll be there, he said. She drove away and he watched the tail lights of the Civic until they turned the corner and then he walked back to his shop because he'd been away from it all day and there was still the Triumph Bonavville with its tank off waiting for his attention. And work was what he knew how to do with a night that still had hours in it. Marcus came through the shop door at 9:30 and stood inside it and looked at Will at the workbench with the triumph and they were quiet together for a moment. The way they had always been able to be quiet without it meaning distance.
You should sleep, Marcus said. I'm almost done with this carburetor. Will said it'll be there in the morning. Carl Briggs has been waiting 3 weeks. Will said he's a retired school teacher who rode this bike cross country four times.
He deserves to have it back. Marcus came and stood beside the bench. He looked at the carburetor, laid out in its components on the clean cloth Will had spread. He picked up one of the jets and turned it over in his fingers the way Will sometimes did with wrenches feeling the weight of it. "Do you remember the Norton you rebuilt in Billings?"
Marcus said, "The complete rebuild. You worked on that thing for 2 years. Still think about it, Will said. You sold it for less than it was worth. The man needed it, Will said.