"Do they ever cause trouble?" I ask, because I need to say something that isn't what I was about to say.
She turns back to me with a look that could strip paint. "Those boys? Not a chance. They'd help an old lady across the street and half of them have. They might look mean on their bikes but they are good to this town, Savannah, and this town knows it. We're protected here and that means something." She holds my eye for a second to make sure I've heard her. "Austin has a lot to do with that, by the way. He's not just a mechanic anymore."
She walks away before I can ask what she means by that.
Dad puts his hand over mine on the table. "They're not bad people, Sav. I know it's complicated but they look after us. When things have gone wrong in this town, we know who to call. They might not do everything by the book but they're ours."
Ruby comes back to refill Dad's coffee and she gives me a look that means she's not done. "His boy is the image of him," she says, setting the pot down. "Nine years old now. EJ. Comes in here with his dad sometimes on a Saturday. Sits up at the counter and has a strawberry milkshake, same as you."
I stare at my glass.
"He's a good father," Ruby says, and her voice is quieter now, not gossipy, genuinely meaning it. "That boy doesn't want for anything. Not attention, not love. You can see it."
I don't know what to do with that. I take a sip of my milkshake and I say nothing and Ruby watches me with the expression of a woman who has spent forty years serving this town and has seen every variety of human feeling come through her diner.
"You're not as over him as you think you are, sweetheart," she says. Not unkindly. Just a fact.
I don't answer. I don't need to. We both know she's right and saying so out loud isn't going to help either of us.
She tops up my milkshake without being asked and moves on down the counter.
I eat some of my pecan pie and I don't say anything, the bikes are gone from the window and the street is just a street again. But everything Ruby said is sitting in my chest and won't move.
He's not just a mechanic anymore. His boy has a strawberry milkshake on Saturdays. Nine years old and the image of his father.
I didn't ask about any of this. I was not going to ask about any of this. That was the plan and I was doing fine until this milkshake and this diner and this town that remembers everything whether you ask it to or not.
"Things have really changed around here," I say finally.
Dad smiles over his coffee. "Most things. Not everything."
I know he's not talking about the town.
AUSTIN
I can't explain it.
I'm in the middle of replacing the brake lines on a Softail that came in yesterday. My hands know what they're doing well enough that my head has gone somewhere else, which is normally fine. Normally my head goes somewhere useful when my hands are occupied, but today it just keeps stopping.
Like something's different about the air and I can't work out what.
I look up at the bay doors. Same yard. Same sky. Brick's truck is parked at the same angle it's always at. Seb is arguing with someone on the phone outside the side door.
Everything is exactly the same as yesterday.
"You're doing that thing," Brick says from somewhere behind me.
"What thing."
"The thing where you stare at nothing and stop working."
I look back at the brake lines. "I'm thinking."
"About?"
"The job."
Brick says nothing to this, which means he doesn't believe me. He walks past and puts a cup of coffee on the edge of the workbench but keeps walking, saying nothing. That's Brick, that's exactly Brick, and normally I find it reassuring.
