Page 38 of Roadrunner

I zipped my fingers across my lips.

The truck squealed into the lot and stopped a few feet away. Price kicked the passenger door twice before it gave, muttering about having to ride in a cage.

“Bust?” I asked.

“No,” Price said. “We got it.”

“Where is it?”

He jerked his thumb at the truck bed. “Back there. In boxes.”

I pictured Riley’s next year of weekends disappearing into the garage, one rusted piece at a time. “In boxes. That’s rough.”

Riley grinned like he’d won something. “Not really. We got it for nothing.”

I looked in the bed. Crumpled boxes, rust-colored parts stacked on top of each other with no apparent order. It looked less like a motorcycle and more like a car accident.

“Sounds expensive,” I said. “Inventorying it. Figuring out what’s missing.”

“That’s the good part,” Riley said. “It’s all there. All it costs is time.”

“What’d you end up paying?”

“Guy wanted four grand,” Price said, laughing. “I told him it’d run six to have someone assemble it and it wasn’t worth more than seven put together. He looks at me like I insulted his mother. Says, ‘You telling me you don’t know how to assemble an Evo?’ I said, ‘What do I look like, a fucking motorcycle mechanic? I’m a short-order cook working minimum wage. Take a grand for it?’ He said, ‘Make it fifteen hundred.’”

I hoped, quietly, that it was going to end up in Price’s garage instead of ours. “So who bought it?”

“I did,” Riley said. “He talked the guy down. I wrote the check.”

My stomach dropped a little at the thought of a year of evenings lost to a garage floor.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Put it away.”

“In boxes?”

“For now.”

Relief, unearned and immediate. “You’re not building it?”

“I’ll build it one day,” he said. “Not now.”

I hoped one day was a long way off. I told him otherwise. “I can’t wait until you start. Can I help?”

“Not really a girl project. Sorry.”

“You’re doing it alone?”

He looked at the pile of boxed rusty junk in the truck bed. “Hope not.”

“Who’s helping?”

“When the time comes, I’ll find somebody. It’s years off, don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll make sandwiches for the crew,” I said, mostly relieved I wouldn’t have to make good on it anytime soon.

He grinned. “I’ll hold you to it.”