I used to think uncertainty meant you hadn't looked hard enough.<\/p>\n
If something didn't make sense, I believed there was probably a detail you had missed.<\/p>\n
Look again.<\/p>\n
Ask another question.<\/p>\n
Check the thing you had already checked.<\/p>\n
Eventually, the answer would appear.<\/p>\n
That approach had served me well enough with ordinary problems.<\/p>\n
It was less useful with Brix's warning.<\/p>\n
We could repeat the questions.<\/p>\n
We could examine the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
We could revisit every detail of what he had told us.<\/p>\n
None of that changed the fact that we had not been present at the diner.<\/p>\n
We had not heard the argument ourselves.<\/p>\n
We did not know what the two men had meant.<\/p>\n
And we had no way to determine what the diner man expected Brix to have seen.<\/p>\n
The missing information was not sitting on our workbench waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\n
It belonged to other people.<\/p>\n
That realization frustrated me.<\/p>\n
It also forced me to be more honest.<\/p>\n
I had been treating the situation as though a little more thought would reveal the answer.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it wouldn't.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we would have to wait until we learned something new.<\/p>\n
I didn't like waiting.<\/p>\n
But I liked inventing answers even less.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead remained our most immediate responsibility.<\/p>\n
We had worked hard to get it running, and the memorial ride was still approaching.<\/p>\n
There was no reason to abandon that work simply because our attention had been pulled elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Reed seemed determined to keep those two things separate.<\/p>\n
He checked the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He made sure the work we had done remained sound.<\/p>\n
He dealt with practical matters instead of spending the entire day searching for a meaning we couldn't establish.<\/p>\n
I tried to do the same.<\/p>\n
Odom still looked uneasy.<\/p>\n
Every so often, he would glance at the front windows.<\/p>\n
I caught myself doing it too.<\/p>\n
The movement had become almost automatic.<\/p>\n
Look at the road.<\/p>\n
Look back at the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
Return to the work.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to admit how much the conversation had changed my behavior.<\/p>\n
There was no visible threat outside.<\/p>\n
Nothing had happened in the shop that proved anyone was watching us.<\/p>\n
We had only Brix's account.<\/p>\n
That account mattered, but it did not justify treating every ordinary sound as evidence of danger.<\/p>\n
I kept telling myself that.<\/p>\n
It helped.<\/p>\n
Not enough to make the concern disappear, but enough to keep it from taking over.<\/p>\n
Later, Odom asked Reed how much remained to be done before the ride.<\/p>\n
Reed answered him plainly.<\/p>\n
They discussed the motorcycle, the remaining work, and the time we had available.<\/p>\n
For several minutes, the conversation stayed practical.<\/p>\n
I listened and felt some relief.<\/p>\n
We were back on familiar ground.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was a real event.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle was a real machine.<\/p>\n
The remaining work could be identified and completed.<\/p>\n
Those facts didn't depend on guessing what somebody at a diner had meant.<\/p>\n
I wanted to stay with them.<\/p>\n
Then Odom glanced toward the front door again.<\/p>\n
"Do you think we'll hear anything else?"<\/p>\n
Reed looked at him.<\/p>\n
"About what?"<\/p>\n
"About the man. About whatever he was talking about."<\/p>\n
Reed took a moment.<\/p>\n
"I can't say."<\/p>\n
Odom nodded.<\/p>\n
That answer seemed to settle the matter, at least for the moment.<\/p>\n
We could not force new information to arrive.<\/p>\n
We could not make Brix remember something he hadn't heard.<\/p>\n
And we could not know whether the diner man would say or do anything else.<\/p>\n
The uncertainty remained.<\/p>\n
I found myself thinking about the phrase Brix had repeated from the argument.<\/p>\n
Something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
He had not told us that he knew what the men were looking for.<\/p>\n
He had not said the object was connected to the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He had only heard enough to remember the deadline.<\/p>\n
I had to keep that distinction clear.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle and Saturday were both part of the account, but we didn't know whether the two were connected in the way I suspected.<\/p>\n
The diner man had asked about the bike.<\/p>\n
The argument had concerned something being found.<\/p>\n
Those details might belong together.<\/p>\n
They might not.<\/p>\n
I couldn't honestly claim otherwise.<\/p>\n
Still, the repeated questions bothered me.<\/p>\n
The diner man hadn't simply asked whether Brix knew Reed.<\/p>\n
He had asked about the shop, the person running it, and the motorcycle itself.<\/p>\n
That combination was too specific for me to dismiss completely.<\/p>\n
I could acknowledge that without deciding what it meant.<\/p>\n
It was a small distinction.<\/p>\n
It made a difference.<\/p>\n
As the hours passed, I began to understand that our problem had two parts.<\/p>\n
First, we had to prepare the motorcycle for the memorial ride.<\/p>\n
Second, we had to remain aware that something unusual might be happening around it.<\/p>\n
Neither responsibility erased the other.<\/p>\n
We could not let the warning consume all our attention.<\/p>\n
We also could not pretend it had never happened.<\/p>\n
I thought about Brix again.<\/p>\n
He had come to us carrying a canvas bag and a story he didn't fully understand.<\/p>\n
He had told us what he remembered.<\/p>\n
We had listened, asked questions, and tried to make sense of it.<\/p>\n
That was all we could fairly ask of him.<\/p>\n
I hoped he understood that.<\/p>\n
I hoped he didn't leave the conversation believing we expected him to solve the mystery.<\/p>\n
The burden was not his alone.<\/p>\n
Whatever the diner man had intended, he had chosen to ask the questions.<\/p>\n
Whatever the two men had argued about, they had been the ones having the conversation.<\/p>\n
Brix had simply heard part of it.<\/p>\n
And then he had been honest about what he knew.<\/p>\n
That mattered to me.<\/p>\n
I looked at the workbench.<\/p>\n
Odom's phone was still there.<\/p>\n
The tools were arranged around it.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle stood nearby.<\/p>\n
Ordinary things.<\/p>\n
Concrete things.<\/p>\n
Things we could understand without inventing a story about them.<\/p>\n
I took comfort in that small patch of certainty.<\/p>\n
We knew where we stood.<\/p>\n
We knew what work remained.<\/p>\n
We knew the memorial ride was approaching.<\/p>\n
We knew what Brix had told us.<\/p>\n
Everything beyond those facts remained uncertain.<\/p>\n
I didn't have to like that.<\/p>\n
I only had to stop pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n
Reed finished what he was doing and stepped back from the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He looked at Odom, then at me.<\/p>\n
"We keep going."<\/p>\n
It was a simple decision.<\/p>\n
No dramatic promise.<\/p>\n
No claim that the problem had been solved.<\/p>\n
Just a decision to continue with the work while keeping our eyes open.<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
Odom did the same.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead was still running when we needed it to.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was still close.<\/p>\n
And the questions from the diner had not disappeared.<\/p>\n
But we had stopped trying to answer them with guesses.<\/p>\n
For now, that was the best choice we could make.<\/p>\n
I used to think uncertainty meant you hadn't looked hard enough. If something didn't make sense, I believed there was probably a detail you had missed. Look again. Ask another … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40069,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40049\/revisions\/40069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}