Page 119 of Roadrunner

“Could,” Riley agreed. “Then he’d know how to do the one thing I told him. This way he learns how to figure out the next hundred things I’m not there for.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that except that it was, like most things Riley said, exactly right.

The third Saturday in March went badly, and it was the first time I understood that this project could actually fail, not just take a long time.

Riley had gone inside to take a call from the shop. Arthur, left alone with the primary cover and a socket set and eleven-year-old confidence, decided he could get the last stubborn bolt free himself rather than wait. He put his whole weight on the ratchet. The bolt didn’t move. The socket slipped, cracked across two of the cover’s fins, and skittered across the concrete.

Riley came back to a spiderweb of hairline fractures in a part that had been, until four minutes earlier, one of the only pieces in either box that didn’t need replacing.

He didn’t yell. That almost made it worse. He went very quiet, picked up the cover, and turned it over twice in his hands. He set it down on the bench with a precision that had anger folded somewhere inside it.

“I told you to wait for me on anything you hadn’t done before,” he said flatly.

He was controlled in the specific way that meant it was costing him something to be controlled.

“I thought I had it,” Arthur said. His chin was up, but his voice wasn’t.

“You didn’t have it. That’s the whole problem with thinking you have it.” Riley picked the cover back up, looked at the cracks again, and exhaled through his nose. “This is a forty-year-old casting. OEM Harley part. Correct casting numbers and date codes. You don’t just order another one of these. I’ve got to find somebody who has the right one, or it’s wrong. It could be a week or a month, and either way we’re stopped until it’s found.”

Arthur didn’t say anything. His jaw was doing the thing it did when he was fighting not to cry in front of people, a thing I recognized because I’d watched Riley do the exact same thing at the exact same angle more times than I could count.

I started to get up from the steps. Riley’s hand came up without looking at me.

I sat back down, because this wasn’t mine to fix.

Riley set the cover down. He crouched so he was eye level with Arthur instead of standing over him.

“Here’s what actually happened,” he said, quieter now. “You made a mistake. Everybody who’s ever built anything has broken a part they were proud of two minutes before they broke it. I’ve done it. My father did it. That’s not the part I’m upset about.” He held Arthur’s gaze. “The part I’m upset about is that you knew the rule, and you decided your confidence was worth more than the rule, and it cost us a part we can’t easily get back. That’s the lesson. Not the crack. The deciding.”

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said, and this time his voice did break, just slightly, right at the end of the word.

“I know you are.” Riley picked up the ruined cover and turned it over once more, like he was saying goodbye to it. “Doesn’t fix the cover. But it’s the right thing to say, and I believe you mean it.” He stood. “Go grab my phone out of the truck. We’re calling every salvage yard in three counties, and you’re doing the talking, since you’re the one who’s going to be explaining to strangers why we need a forty-year-old primary cover.”

It took eight days and calls to three states to find the right one. Arthur made every call himself, reading off a legal pad of questions Riley had helped him write, and by the fifth call he’d stopped needing the legal pad at all.

They lost most of a week to it. Neither of them mentioned quitting once.

Della came one Saturday in April.

She sat beside me on the steps and we watched without talking for a while. In the garage Riley was explaining something about the primary chain and Arthur was asking follow-up questions that told me he’d been thinking about the previous week’s lesson and had come back with more.

Della watched them.

“Antonio would have parked himself right there in that garage and never left,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“He always said Riley would make a good father.” She paused. “He said some men were built for it and some men weren’t, and Riley was built for it.”

I looked at the garage.

“He was right,” I said.

She nodded. “He was always right,” she said. “It was his most annoying quality.”

I laughed.

She smiled.