For a while, nobody said anything about the diner.
I listened to the motorcycle and watched Reed continue working.
The room felt quieter, even with the engine running.
It wasn't because the situation had improved.
We had simply stopped asking it to explain itself.
Odom's phone remained on the workbench.
Brix still held his canvas bag.
The front windows showed the same ordinary view they had shown earlier.
Nothing in the shop had changed enough to give us a new answer.
I found that easier to accept than I had before.
The morning had begun with a motorcycle that needed work.
Then Brix had brought us information that made the motorcycle seem connected to something we did not understand.
We had listened to him.
We had asked what he remembered.
He had told us what he knew.
That was where the conversation had brought us.
I didn't want to pretend it had taken us farther.
I also didn't want to dismiss what he had said simply because we couldn't make sense of it yet.
Both mistakes would have been easy.
One would have let us ignore the warning.
The other would have encouraged us to invent a danger we could not describe.
Neither would have helped.
I looked toward Brix.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Yeah."
I didn't ask him to explain the answer.
He had been through enough questions for one morning.
I had no reason to make him account for every expression or pause.
He had come to us with something troubling.
We had heard him.
That was what mattered.
Odom glanced toward Reed.
"How are we doing?"
Reed answered without looking away from the work.
"Still working."
It was such an ordinary response that I almost smiled.
There was nothing false in it.
We were still working.
The motorcycle was running.
The memorial ride was approaching.
The questions remained unanswered.
Those things could all be true at the same time.
I had spent too much of the morning treating uncertainty as a problem that had to be removed before we could continue.
Now I understood that we could keep moving while admitting what we didn't know.
It did not make the questions less important.
It simply kept them from becoming the only things we could think about.
I looked at the Shovelhead.
The machine had been the reason for our work before Brix spoke.
It remained the reason afterward.
The diner man's interest had changed how I felt about it, but it had not changed the facts we knew about the motorcycle.
I had to remember that distinction.
If we eventually learned why the man had asked about it, we could reconsider what his questions meant.
Until then, the motorcycle was still the machine in front of us.
Reed was still the person working on it.
Odom was still beside the workbench.
Brix was still the person who had told us what he heard.
And I was still trying to understand how much weight to give a warning that came without an explanation.
I didn't have a perfect answer.
I doubted any of us did.
But I no longer felt that I had to hide that uncertainty behind a confident guess.
"At least we know what he said," Odom remarked.
I looked at him.
"Yes."
It was a small piece of certainty.
The diner man had asked Brix about the shop, Reed, and the motorcycle.
He had wanted to know whether Brix had been inside before, whether Reed had spoken to him, and what Brix had seen on the motorcycle.
Brix had heard the man arguing with another person behind the kitchen.
They had mentioned something being found before Saturday.
Those were the details we had.
I could repeat them without changing them.
I could remember them without adding an explanation.
That was more useful than I had understood earlier.
The story in my head had been growing beyond the story Brix had actually told us.
Every time I imagined a possible connection, I found another question that seemed to support it.
But the questions did not prove the answers.
I had been building possibilities on top of possibilities until I could no longer tell which details came from Brix and which came from me.
I didn't want to keep doing that.
The simplest approach was to return to his actual words.
Not because they solved anything.
Because they were the only account we had.
I glanced toward the front windows, remembering how Brix had looked in that direction before telling us about the argument.
I had wondered what he was checking for.
I still didn't know.
I had no reason to turn that glance into evidence of anything else.
He had looked toward the windows.
Then he had told us what he remembered.
I could leave it there.
The phone on the workbench caught my eye again.
Odom had not needed it to explain the situation.
I had been waiting for some action to make the uncertainty feel smaller, but no action had presented itself clearly.
There was no obvious call to make.
There was no known person who could explain what the diner man wanted.
There was no confirmed answer to the question of what had been found.
We had no reason to pretend otherwise.
The memorial ride was still ahead of us.
Saturday remained the day the men had mentioned.
That fact would stay with me.
I would not forget it merely because I could not explain it.
I would also not let it convince me that I knew what was coming.
Those were the limits I had to respect.
Reed continued his work.
Odom remained nearby.
Brix stayed with us, his canvas bag in hand.
I watched them and understood that we had reached the end of what we could honestly say about the conversation.
We had heard the warning.
We had taken it seriously.
We had refused to invent the missing pieces.
The motorcycle was running, but the problem behind the diner man's questions had not been resolved.
I couldn't call that a victory.
I couldn't call it a failure, either.
It was simply where we stood.
I returned my attention to the workbench and let the room settle around me.
The questions were still there.
The answers were not.
For now, I had to be willing to leave that difference alone.
The End
Read more original stories on Feel Every Story.
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 20 of 20
