The Garage They Rebuilt Around Me

The ones you remember

Twenty-six years is a lot of bikes. I could not give you a number. More than a thousand, I would guess, if you count the repeats, and there were a lot of repeats.

You remember certain ones.

There was the Perkins boy who bent the same rim four summers running because he would not quit jumping the ditch out behind the grain elevator. I finally built him a wheel out of a heavier rim off a paperboy bike, and that one he could not kill.

There was a set of twin girls, the Hadleys, who came as a matched pair on matched bikes and left notes in my mailbox at Christmas every year clear through high school.

There was a boy named Ray, quiet, no daddy around, who did not just hand me tools. He watched my hands. He asked what the torque felt like, why I backed a nut off a quarter turn after I snugged it. By the time he was fourteen he could rebuild a coaster brake on his own at my bench, and I let him, because a boy like that you do not hold back.

There was a winter a family three streets over fell on hard times, the daddy laid off when the cannery cut a shift, and that Christmas there was a bike under their tree that the mother swore to me later she had not bought. I will only say that a man who keeps a shelf of parts and a few hours on a Saturday can put together a whole bike out of three broken ones, and that I have never confirmed nor denied a thing about it.

There was a boy who brought me a bike that was not his, that he had found in the ditch, and asked me to fix it so he could find who it belonged to and give it back. I fixed it for nothing, same as always, and we did find the owner, and I have thought about that boy a lot in the years since. He is a county deputy now. It tracks.

I did not know it then, but Ray was paying closer attention than any of them. He went off to be a diesel mechanic over in the next county, married a girl from there, and I did not see him for a long stretch of years, just a Christmas card now and again with a photo of children I did not know.

That matters later. I will get to it.

The summer my hands quit

This past spring I noticed it threading a cable.

Just a little shake in my right hand, the kind you tell yourself is too much coffee. Then it was both hands, and it was not the coffee.

The doctor in town has a word for it. He said it with a kind voice and a pamphlet, and I folded the pamphlet into my shirt pocket and drove home the back way so I would not have to talk to anybody at the light.

It is not the kind of thing that kills you. It is the kind of thing that takes the one piece of you that you were most proud of and makes a joke of it.

A machinist’s hands. Forty years steady enough to work to a thousandth of an inch, and now I could not hold a three-eighths wrench steady enough to back a nut off without rounding the corners flat.

I tried. Lord, I tried. One Saturday in May a boy brought me a mountain bike with a sticky derailleur, a ten-minute job, and I stood at that bench for forty-five minutes and could not make the little adjustment screw go where my eyes told my hand to put it.

I gave the boy back his bike half fixed and told him to come again next week, and I knew even as I said it that there would not be a next week.

I sat down on the milk crate after he left, in the quiet, and I grieved it. I am not ashamed to say so. A man is allowed to grieve his own hands.