Chapter 7 - The Rebuilding of the Sage
The box from Pacific Cycle arrived on a Thursday morning in late September.
It did not come by standard parcel delivery. It came on a flatbed straight-truck from a freight forwarder in Greensboro, secured to a wooden pallet by four bands of high-tensile steel strapping that David cut with his eight-inch tin snips: snap, snap, snap.
Inside the five-ply corrugated carton was not an assembled bike.
It was a bare frame.
The replacement Coastal Sage twenty-four-inch cruiser frame, serial number VANCE-B-7721-REV-A, wrapped in five layers of micro-cellular foam and sealed in an airtight poly bag that smelled of fresh enamel and light machine oil.
David spent three nights in the garage with the door open to the autumn air.
The cicadas had died down, replaced by the dry, rhythmic ticking of the crickets in the sweetgum trees along the property line and the occasional roar of a diesel truck hauling tobacco down Highway 50.
He did not use the original components from the smashed bicycle.
He bought a set of SunTour three-speed internal gears from a vintage repair shop in Wilmington, re-lacing the rear wheel by hand using double-butted stainless-steel spokes that he tensioned with a brass dial gauge until every wire sang the exact same note when he plucked it with his fingernail: B-flat.
He replaced the bent front fork with a forty-one-thirty chromoly fork from an old Schwinn Varsity he had kept in the rafters since nineteen-ninety-two, stripping the blue paint with aircraft stripper until the bare silver steel showed its clean, brazed joints, then priming it with three coats of zinc-chromate before laying down four coats of matching seafoam lacquer he had mixed at an auto-body supply shop in Apex.
Eliza sat on an overturned five-gallon drywall bucket beside his workbench.
She had her own small piece of sixty-grit sandpaper, and she spent two hours rubbing the brass bell until the chrome showed through the tarnish, her tongue tucked into the corner of her mouth, her small feet in her new pink sneakers tapping the concrete in time with the country station playing on David's portable radio.
"Is Brooklyn coming tomorrow, Dad?" she asked, blowing a small gray cloud of brass dust off the bell.
"Her dad's bringing her after the shift," David said, his fingers working a spoke wrench with that slow, microscopic precision that only older wiremen have.
"Will she be scared of the hammer?"
David stopped his hand.
He looked over his shoulder at the pegboard beside the miter saw.
The blue Estwing sixteen-ounce was there.
Shayla had brought it back on a Tuesday afternoon three weeks ago, while the rain was coming down in long, gray sheets that flooded the gutters. She had not come into the house. She had walked into the open garage in her high heels, set the tool on the wooden workbench without looking at David, and walked back to Ryan's truck with her shoulders hunched against the wet.
The hammer was clean. David had spent forty minutes with a wire wheel removing every microscopic flake of seafoam paint from the steel cheek, then wiped the metal with boiled linseed oil until it had that dark, greasy, honest sheen it had carried when he was twenty-two years old and pulling wire through the mud in Garner.
"No, bird-dog," David said, looking back at the spokes. "Brooklyn's not scared of tools. Brooklyn knows what tools are for now."
On Saturday at ten in the morning, Ryan's truck pulled into the driveway.
The Dodge Ram did not have its exhaust stacks anymore.
Ryan had sold the chrome pipes to a boy in Clayton to pay the filing fees on the boat transfer, and the truck sounded different now—muffled, tired, its transmission slipping slightly as he backed it around David's service van.
Brooklyn climbed out of the passenger side.
She was wearing a brand-new pair of blue denim overalls that had been bought with her own money from her savings jar, and a white cotton t-shirt with short sleeves that showed the pale, round scar on her knee from the park three months ago.
Her hair was brushed. It was tied back in two neat braids with yellow yarn—not the messy, tangled bun her mother had left her with during the court hearings.
Ryan did not get out of the truck.
He sat behind the steering wheel with the window rolled down three inches, his arm resting on the black plastic sill, his eyes looking straight ahead at the garage door. He did not look at me. He did not look at David.
He reached across the seat, opened the glove box, and handed Brooklyn a small, white cardboard box through the window.
"Don't lose them ribbons, Brook," he said, his voice flat, gravelly, stripped of every ounce of the swap-meet swagger.
"I won't, Daddy," she said.
The truck shifted into reverse, the tires crunching across the gravel apron, and pulled out into the cul-de-sac without its usual roar, disappearing down the hill toward the state road like any other ten-year-old vehicle with two payments left on the book.
Brooklyn walked up the driveway.
She stopped at the edge of the concrete, where the yellow hazard tape had been three weeks ago. The asphalt was clean now; David had used a pressure washer to lift every trace of the green enamel and the spilled tea, leaving only the pale, clean stone beneath.
Eliza came down the steps.
She did not run. She walked with that solemn, important dignity that six-year-old girls use when they are carrying an heirloom across a room.
In her hands, she held the seafoam bicycle.
The white tires were spotless, their little rubber molding whiskers still intact on the tread. The chrome bell sat on the left handlebar, catching the bright September sun like a mirror. And on the front wicker basket, held by two brand-new white leather straps that David had hand-stitched from an old lineman's belt, were four feet of double-faced satin ribbon.
Pink over purple. Purple over pink.
Brooklyn stopped three feet from the front wheel.
She reached out her hand. Her fingers, brown and thin, touched the white rubber grip on the right handlebar.
She didn't ask if it was hers.
She didn't look back toward the road to see if her mother's Lexus was coming around the corner.
She took the grip in her palm, felt the solid, cool resistance of the forty-one-thirty chromoly frame, and looked at Eliza.
"Does it have the bell that rings twice?" Brooklyn asked.
Eliza reached out her thumb, touched the spring-loaded striker, and pulled it back three-quarters of an inch.
DING-DING.
May you like
The sound went out across the driveway, across the boxwoods, across the quiet suburban roofs of the neighborhood, high and clear and clean enough to carry all the way to the river.
"Twice," Eliza said. "Every time."
