By then, I had memorized the questions.
Not because I wanted to.
Because they had been repeated enough times in my head to become familiar.
Had Brix been inside the shop?
Had Reed spoken to him?
What had Brix seen on the motorcycle?
I could hear the words without remembering the exact sound of the diner man's voice.
That was the strange part.
The conversation had happened somewhere else, but it had taken up space in our shop.
We hadn't witnessed it.
We hadn't heard the man ourselves.
Yet we were all reacting to it.
I began to understand why people sometimes became obsessed with incomplete information.
The mind doesn't like an unfinished story.
It wants a beginning, a middle, and an end.
When one part is missing, it keeps trying to supply it.
I was doing that.
I would consider one explanation, then reject it because another possibility seemed just as likely.
Then I would start again.
It was exhausting.
Reed seemed less interested in guessing.
He focused on what could be checked.
If there was a practical task to finish, he finished it.
If there was something about the motorcycle that needed attention, he attended to it.
He did not pretend that the mechanical work could explain the diner man's behavior.
I tried to follow his example.
Odom was more visibly restless.
He moved between the workbench and the motorcycle, sometimes stopping to look at one or the other as if he expected a new detail to appear.
I knew he wanted to help.
I also knew that there wasn't much we could do with what we had.
At one point, he asked Reed the same question I had been thinking about.
"Do you remember anyone mentioning the motorcycle before this?"
Reed considered it.
"People talk. I can't tell you that every conversation meant something."
"That's fair."
"If I remember something specific, I'll say so."
Odom nodded.
He seemed to accept the answer, though it didn't satisfy him.
It didn't satisfy me either.
But we weren't entitled to a better answer just because we wanted one.
I looked at the Shovelhead.
The machine had been our main concern for so long that I had almost forgotten how much time we'd spent worrying about whether we could get it running.
Every delay had felt important.
Every small success had brought relief.
Now the engine's condition seemed like the simplest part of our situation.
We could hear whether it ran.
We could observe how it behaved.
We could work toward a result and see whether we had reached it.
The diner man's intentions were different.
There was no way to test them directly.
We could only consider what Brix had said and avoid pretending that it proved more than it did.
That should have made things easier.
Instead, it made me impatient.
I wanted the missing information.
I wanted to know why the man had been so interested in Reed.
I wanted to know what he thought Brix might have seen.
Most of all, I wanted to know what the argument behind the diner had to do with Saturday.
The questions remained unanswered.
I tried to imagine how Brix had experienced the conversation.
He had been near the back of the diner.
He had heard two men arguing.
He had not been part of their discussion.
He might have caught only a few words.
Then the man had asked him about the shop and the motorcycle.
Later, the man had hit him.
I couldn't know exactly how Brix had connected those moments in his mind.
I only knew that they had stayed with him.
Perhaps he had spent hours wondering whether he had done something wrong.
Perhaps he had worried that telling us would bring more trouble.
Perhaps he had simply needed somebody to listen.
I was careful not to decide which of those things was true.
But I couldn't ignore the fact that he had come forward despite his uncertainty.
That took something.
I thought about how easy it would have been for him to keep quiet.
He could have told himself that the questions were none of his business.
He could have decided that the argument was something he didn't need to remember.
He could have left us to finish the motorcycle without ever mentioning what he had heard.
Instead, he had walked into the shop and told us.
I was grateful for that.
I was also aware that gratitude did not solve the problem.
Reed came over to the workbench and rested one hand against it.
"Whatever the man meant, we don't know yet."
Odom looked at him.
"I know."
"We shouldn't act like we do."
"I know that too."
Reed gave him a small nod.
I could tell they were both frustrated.
Neither wanted to turn uncertainty into an accusation.
Neither wanted to ignore something that might matter.
Those were reasonable concerns.
They were also difficult to hold together.
For a while, nobody spoke.
The shop had its own familiar sounds.
A tool being moved.
Footsteps crossing the floor.
The quiet movement of people going about their work.
I found comfort in those ordinary details.
They reminded me that the world had not suddenly changed just because we had heard a troubling account.
We still had the same responsibilities.
We still had the same work to finish.
And we still had time before Saturday, even if it no longer felt like enough.
I glanced at the clock.
Odom noticed.
"You're counting the hours too?"
I gave him a tired smile.
"Apparently."
He looked toward the motorcycle.
"I'd rather be counting the things we have left to do."
"Me too."
For a moment, we were talking about the repair again.
That felt good.
It was a familiar problem.
We could make a list of what remained and work through it.
We could see what needed attention.
We could finish the job.
Then the other questions returned.
Not because we had invited them.
Because we still had no answers.
I wondered whether the diner man would continue asking about the motorcycle.
I wondered whether he believed Brix had told us something.
I wondered whether the other man from the argument knew anything about our shop.
Each question led to another.
I stopped myself before I could go further.
We had no evidence that the diner man had followed Brix.
We had no evidence that the other man knew where we worked.
We had no evidence that anything had been hidden on the motorcycle.
Those were possibilities, not facts.
I needed to keep remembering that.
Reed returned to the Shovelhead.
He stood beside it for a moment, then turned his attention to the work that remained.
There was something reassuring about his decision.
He wasn't dismissing the warning.
He was refusing to let it consume every part of the day.
I followed his lead.
We worked.
We checked what needed checking.
We made sure we were not neglecting the motorcycle because we were distracted by questions that had no immediate answers.
It wasn't a solution.
It was simply the next sensible thing to do.
And sometimes, when you are stuck in a situation you cannot yet understand, the next sensible thing is all you have.
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: The Memorial Ride Was Getting Closer, and I Finally Understood That Our Biggest Problem Was Not Knowing Which Questions Mattered Most
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 7 of 20
