“How can you tell?” Nora wonders, gazing up at the vaguely home-shaped void, indistinguishable from the ones around it.
Abram kneels in the yard and runs his fingers through the weedy grass. He looks up at the dead tree near the fence and the remains of a rope swing dangling from it. A very faint smile touches his face.
The top floor is crushed under the collapsed roof, but the bottom is still standing, and a steep driveway ramp leads down to a basement garage. Abram climbs the steps to the front door and pulls on the knob. The scorched wood creaks and flexes but doesn’t budge. He turns and heads for the garage.
“Wait,” Julie says. “We can break it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Bikes are in the shop.”
“You don’t want to go in the house?” She’s incredulous. “The house you grew up in?”
He stops in front of the garage door and looks at her flatly. “I didn’t grow up here. I played with toys and rode bikes here. I grew up in an Axiom training center.”
He pulls on the garage door and it slides open. A cloud of charcoal dust rolls out like a curse from a disturbed tomb. He coughs once, then steps inside.
We follow him at a respectful distance. M stays on the sidewalk, holding his rifle in the deceptively casual stance of a veteran soldier on guard duty, slipping back into his first life like his second never happened.
“So this is The Shop,” Nora says reverently, turning in a slow circle. “Mr. Kelvin talked about it all the time. Eyes got all dreamy like it was paradise lost.”
The garage is actually the entire basement, work benches covered in tools, engine parts piled in the corners, and enough cans of fuel for a ride to Brazil and back. The center of the space is clear except for five mounds under canvas tarps. Abram unveils them one by one: five gleaming black motorcycles, compact BMW street bikes devoid of any spread-legged swagger—they would look very serious and practical if not for their vintage flair. They’re classics bordering on antiques, their clean lines and abundance of chrome evoking an era of peace and love, love is all you need, it’s easy if you try. I hear songs and poems and protests and I wonder: Has any generation since then really believed in something? Or did that one failed leap embarrass us into never trying again?
A sad smile touches Julie’s face. “Perry’s Slash-Fives. He rode some modern shit for salvages but these were the ones he loved.”
Abram inspects the engines, tests the brakes, taps at rusty patches with a screwdriver.
“I used to think they didn’t look tough enough,” Julie says. “I wanted him to get a Harley. He said I had no taste and if I ever brought up ‘gorilla bikes’ again he wouldn’t teach me how to ride.” She laughs, lost in nostalgia. “He was kind of a dick.”
Abram ignores her, puttering around the shop, sifting through tools and grabbing parts off shelves with a familiarity that must have been etched deeply to have lasted this long.
“Your dad kept saying he’d come back for his babies someday,” Nora says, trying to catch Abram’s eyes. “I bet he’d be happy to know you’re doing it now.”
Abram slides a pan under one of the bikes and begins draining the oil.
“Hey,” Nora says.
“What,” Abram says.
“Why don’t you want to talk to us?”
He gets up and digs through a drawer, pulls out a box of oil filters.
“You spend half your life looking for your family, you finally find people who knew them, and you don’t have a single question for us? You don’t want to know how I knew your dad? You don’t want to know what your brother was like?”
“I wanted to meet my brother,” Abram says, going to work on the next bike while the first one drains. “I wanted to see what kind of man he turned into and I wanted to get to know him.” He moves the pan into place. “What I didn’t want is to listen to strangers describe him to me like a character in a fucking book.” He unscrews the cap and the old black sludge puddles into the pan. “Perry’s gone. Perry doesn’t exist.”
The garage is silent except for the clink of two wrenches that Sprout is forcing to dance with each other.
“Why are you even here?” Julie says. Her voice is tight. “If you can erase your family that easily and we’re just useless strangers to you, why didn’t you ditch us the moment you realized Perry was dead?”
Abram gets up and disappears behind the third bike. “I’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to ride these out of here. Why don’t you and Sprout go outside and play? You both like make-believe.”
Julie turns and walks stiffly out of the shop. Sprout follows her, still clinking her wrenches together. Nora and I glance at each other, then follow Sprout.
Julie is standing in the grass with her hands pressed to her lower back, gazing up at the sky and breathing slowly. Sprout walks up close to her and thrusts the wrenches out as if to say lookit.
“What are those guys?” Julie asks, forcing a playful smile.
“Mr. and Mrs. Wrench. They’re ballerinas.”
Julie giggles. “Mr. Wrench is such a good name for a ballerina.”