Reed's attention stayed on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
I watched him for a while, wondering how he managed to keep working when so much had changed in the way we understood the morning.<\/p>\n
Then I realized the question was unfair.<\/p>\n
He wasn't ignoring what Brix had told us.<\/p>\n
He was simply not pretending that he could solve it by staring at the same facts we had all heard.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead was in front of him.<\/p>\n
The work was in front of him.<\/p>\n
Those were things he could actually deal with.<\/p>\n
I had been looking for a similar task, something that would let me feel useful without asking anyone to explain what they could not explain.<\/p>\n
I hadn't found one.<\/p>\n
So I kept watching.<\/p>\n
The sound of the engine made it harder to forget why we were there.<\/p>\n
We had been working toward a straightforward goal.<\/p>\n
We wanted the motorcycle running for the memorial ride.<\/p>\n
Saturday was close enough that the remaining time mattered.<\/p>\n
The argument Brix had overheard had made that date feel different, but it had not changed what the date meant to us.<\/p>\n
The ride was still the ride.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle was still the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
And the questions about the diner man remained unanswered.<\/p>\n
I tried to keep those facts separate.<\/p>\n
"How much time do we have?" I asked.<\/p>\n
Odom looked toward me.<\/p>\n
"Until Saturday?"<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
He paused, working it out from what we had already said.<\/p>\n
"Not much."<\/p>\n
That answer was enough.<\/p>\n
We knew the memorial ride was forty-nine hours away when the warning first came into the conversation.<\/p>\n
The time had not stopped while we stood around discussing it.<\/p>\n
Every minute spent talking was a minute that had passed.<\/p>\n
That did not mean we should ignore Brix.<\/p>\n
It meant we needed to be careful about how we used the time we had.<\/p>\n
Reed looked up briefly.<\/p>\n
"We still need to finish what we're doing here."<\/p>\n
Nobody argued.<\/p>\n
I knew the motorcycle's running condition mattered to him.<\/p>\n
It mattered to all of us.<\/p>\n
The work had been the reason we were gathered in the first place.<\/p>\n
I didn't want the new uncertainty to erase that.<\/p>\n
At the same time, I couldn't pretend the conversation had been ordinary.<\/p>\n
A man had asked Brix about the shop and the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He had wanted to know whether Brix had been inside and whether Reed had talked to him.<\/p>\n
Then Brix had heard that man arguing with someone about something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
Those details were too specific for me to forget.<\/p>\n
But they were not enough to tell us what would happen next.<\/p>\n
I had to accept both things at once.<\/p>\n
I could take the warning seriously without deciding that the worst explanation must be true.<\/p>\n
I could keep working without claiming that the work was all that mattered.<\/p>\n
I could listen to Brix without expecting him to know what the men had meant.<\/p>\n
The difficulty was that each of those choices felt incomplete.<\/p>\n
I wanted certainty.<\/p>\n
I wanted someone to tell us what the diner man had been looking for and why he had asked about Reed.<\/p>\n
I wanted the mention of Saturday to have a clear meaning.<\/p>\n
Instead, I had a running motorcycle, a phone on a workbench, a man holding a canvas bag, and three people trying not to mistake their fears for facts.<\/p>\n
That was the truth of the situation.<\/p>\n
It wasn't dramatic.<\/p>\n
It wasn't satisfying.<\/p>\n
It was simply what we had.<\/p>\n
I moved closer to the workbench and gave Odom room.<\/p>\n
He shifted slightly, making space without saying anything.<\/p>\n
The movement reminded me that we were still working together, even if none of us knew exactly how to handle what Brix had brought into the shop.<\/p>\n
I looked toward Reed.<\/p>\n
He had not stopped paying attention to the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
There was something steady in that.<\/p>\n
Not confidence that everything would be fine.<\/p>\n
Not a claim that the diner man's questions meant nothing.<\/p>\n
Just a refusal to abandon the one task we understood.<\/p>\n
I respected that more than I had earlier.<\/p>\n
"Do you want me to do anything?" I asked.<\/p>\n
Reed glanced at me.<\/p>\n
"Just stay close for now."<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
I didn't need a more complicated instruction.<\/p>\n
I stayed where I could see the workbench and the motorcycle without crowding either.<\/p>\n
Brix was still nearby.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he wanted to leave, but I didn't ask.<\/p>\n
He had come to tell us something that troubled him.<\/p>\n
I couldn't assume what he wanted to do afterward.<\/p>\n
He might have needed a moment to think.<\/p>\n
He might simply have been waiting for us to respond.<\/p>\n
Whatever the reason, I didn't want to make another assumption and treat it as knowledge.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle kept running.<\/p>\n
I listened to its steady sound and tried to return my attention to the work.<\/p>\n
For a few seconds, I managed it.<\/p>\n
Then my thoughts returned to the word Saturday.<\/p>\n
It was only a day on the calendar.<\/p>\n
It was also the day of the memorial ride and the deadline mentioned in the argument Brix had heard.<\/p>\n
I could not make those facts less troubling by refusing to think about them.<\/p>\n
But I could refuse to make them mean more than they did.<\/p>\n
I did not know what had been found.<\/p>\n
I did not know who was supposed to find it.<\/p>\n
I did not know whether the motorcycle held any connection to the argument beyond the diner man's questions.<\/p>\n
I knew only that Brix had heard the words and remembered them.<\/p>\n
That was where I had to stop.<\/p>\n
Reed continued with the work.<\/p>\n
Odom stayed nearby.<\/p>\n
I remained close enough to listen if either of them spoke.<\/p>\n
Nothing new had been discovered.<\/p>\n
Nothing had been explained.<\/p>\n
Still, we had a task in front of us, and we could keep doing it without pretending it answered the other questions.<\/p>\n
That was enough for the moment.<\/p>\n
Reed's attention stayed on the motorcycle. I watched him for a while, wondering how he managed to keep working when so much had changed in the way we understood the … <\/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-40056","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\/40056","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=40056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40076,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40056\/revisions\/40076"}],"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=40056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}