Page 121 of Roadrunner

Arthur stood beside the motorcycle.

He looked at Riley.

“Go ahead,” Riley said.

Arthur approached the handlebars and put his thumb on the start button.

He looked at it for a moment. “Is it in neutral?”

Riley grinned. “Yep.”

Arthur pushed the button. The engine turned over.

Didn’t catch.

He did it again.

It caught.

The sound filled the garage. Not loud. An old, smaller displacement engine finding its idle. But alive. Running on its own. Breathing in and out with the rhythm of a machine doing what it was made to do for the first time.

Arthur stepped back.

He looked at it.

The motorcycle sat in the center of the garage and idled.

It sounded right.

Riley looked at it for a long time.

I watched his face.

Whatever he was feeling, he wasn’t rationing it out the way he usually did.

He showed a great deal right now.

He didn’t try to hide it.

He looked at the motorcycle and then at Arthur and something moved across his face that was so uncomplicated and complete that I had to look away for a moment.

Arthur was looking at the motorcycle. He hadn’t looked at Riley yet. He was giving the machine its moment. Which was so exactly the right thing to do that it told me something about the boy that I already knew and would never stop being grateful for.

Then he looked at Riley.

Riley extended his fist.

Arthur looked at it.

He made a fist and bumped it against Riley’s.

Firm. Deliberate. The weight of an agreement being made between two people who understood what agreements meant.

I thought about what I’d once known about bikers. About the way they made agreements with a look or a nod or a handshake that meant more than most people’s signatures.

I thought about fist bumps as contracts.

This one was the most binding thing I’d ever witnessed.