Page 148 of Roadrunner

All of them. Standing in the lot in a loose group the way they stood at things that mattered. Not a party formation. Not casual. Something between the two.

Price was there with his hair pushed back.

Brisco was there with his hands in his pockets and an expression of elaborate indifference that convinced no one.

I glanced around.

Lackey. Sparks. The newer members I’d come to know by name over the past year. Jay, who I recognized from the body shop, standing slightly apart with his arms crossed and the look of a man waiting for a verdict on his work.

I parked.

I looked at the group.

Then I saw what they were standing around.

It was in the center of the parking lot.

A Jeep.

My Jeep.

Not as I’d last seen it. Not crumpled under a tarp in a storage unit outside Monterey, looking like something dropped from a great height. Not the mangled unrecognizable thing I’d covered and locked away because I couldn’t look at it.

My Jeep.

The color exactly right. The specific shade that had faded over years in the Arizona sun to something more personal than the factory applied finish. The top down the way I’d always kept it in warm weather. The wheels I’d replaced sophomore year still on it, cleaned. The tires dressed.

The dents were gone.

The frame that couldn’t be fixed was obviously fixed.

I thought of Jay’s voice on the phone months earlier, unhurried and unimpressed by his own capability. I hadn’t believed him, not really. Not the way you believe a fact rather than a kindness. As I admired the Jeep I understood at that he’d simply been telling the truth, the way Riley always told the truth, without any interest in whether I was ready to hear it.

It sat in the center of the parking lot like it had simply been parked there. Like nothing had happened to it. Like it had been waiting.

I stared in admiration.

Arthur put his hand on my arm. “Mom.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Mom,” he said again. Gently.

I walked toward it.

The club parted without being asked. They stepped back and made a path and I walked through it and nobody said anything.

I walked around it once.

All the way around.

Slowly. Looking at every panel. Every line. The rear corner that had always had a small scrape I’d never repaired because it happened the first week I owned it and became part of the story. Still there. Jay had kept it. I stopped when I saw it.

He’d kept the scrape.

My hand went to my mouth.

I looked at Jay across the hood.