And before that, prospecting and earning my place. He was quiet for a moment. I was good at it, not because I was violent. The violence always bothered me, the unnecessary kind, but because I was dependable. I could fix anything mechanical.
I could read situations I knew when something was about to go wrong before it went wrong. They called me the mechanic. Not for the obvious reason, though. The obvious reason applied for the other one. What other reason?
Emily said, "Because when something was broken, Will said, I fixed it." The statement landed in the quiet shop, and Emily felt the weight of it in a way that had nothing to do with motorcycles. "Why did you leave?" She asked, his jaw tightened. "Just slightly, just enough."
"I had a brother," he said. "Not blood. Marcus and I, we were the closest, but there was another man, Jimmy Puit. From outside, Billings originally grew up rough. You wouldn't have looked at him twice on the street.
But inside, he was one of the most decent people I've ever known. He believed in people. He'd give you the shirt off his back, literally. I saw him do it once in Denver for a kid sleeping on the street in January. Will stopped.
His voice had changed, gotten quieter. The uninflected tone developing a current underneath it. We were in a situation that went wrong. Nothing I'm going to describe in detail. What I'll tell you is that Jimmy didn't make it out of it, and it was the kind of wrong that didn't have an explanation you could live with, and it didn't have a person to blame it on that you could point at clearly.
It was just the kind of wrong that happens when men live the way we lived. Emily said nothing. She understood in the way that people who have lost people understand that there are no words that help here and that the most respectful thing is to let someone speak without filling the space. I left. Willow said yes.
Marcus didn't want me to. He understood, but he didn't want me to. I told him I couldn't stay in something that had cost me Jimmy. That the arithmetic didn't work anymore. He looked at his hands.
I came here. I fixed motorcycles. I learned what quiet felt like. It took a long time to feel like enough, and then one day it did, and I thought that was finished. And now, Emily said, he looked at her directly.
And now a 26-year-old boy is frightening Tommy Reese, he said, and taking money from Patty Gould, who served me coffee for 6 years, and making everyone in this town afraid to talk. He uncrossed his arms and picked up the socket, and he'd sat down. I know what that looks like, he said. I've seen it up close, and I know that it doesn't stop on its own. It stops when someone stops it.
Emily stood up from the stool. She stood there for a moment, looking at him, trying to understand the full shape of what she was looking at. "What are you going to do?" She said. "First, I'm going to fix Pete Alcott's oil pressure problem," he said and bent back to the motorcycle.
"Because Pete's been waiting on it for 3 weeks, and that's too long." She almost smiled. Almost. And after that, after that, he said, not looking up. I'm going to make a phone call I haven't made in 22 years.
Emily stood there for another moment. And then she turned and walked out of the shop, and she sat in her Civic in the driveway for a few minutes before starting the engine. She wasn't scared. She wasn't entirely sure what she was. She started the car and drove home to Maggie, and she didn't say anything to anyone about the conversation.
And she found that she trusted him, which was either very wise or very foolish, and she didn't yet know which. Brandon Keller came back on Tuesday. He didn't come himself this time. He sent Decker and Trace and another man a new one Will hadn't seen before with a lean and watchful quality that spoke of deliberate purpose. They came in the late afternoon, and they weren't conversational this time.
Decker walked in and stood in the middle of the shop floor and looked around with the slow, deliberate survey of a man inventorying potential damage. "Mr. Keller wanted me to remind you," Decker said in a voice with no particular effect. "That the offer was 500 a week and it was a good offer." "Well was at the workbench. He turned around."
"Tell him the answer is still no," Will said. Decker nodded slowly like a man making a note. He looked at Trace. Trace moved to the shelf along the wall where Will kept spare parts in labeled bins. And he reached out and tipped the first one over.
Parts scattered across the floor. Dozens of small components that Will had sorted and organized carb jets and throttle cables and points and condensers spreading across the concrete. Will didn't move. Trace looked at him almost disappointed that it didn't land. He tipped over the next bin. $500, Decker said.
Or this is what the shop looks like every morning until you see reason. Will looked at the parts on the floor. He looked at Decker. He was quiet for a moment and then he said, "You boys should leave now." "Or what Trey" said.
"Or the conversation we're having changes character," Will said. His voice was completely level. "Leave the shop. Don't come back." Something happened in the room.