twenty
“Okay, Buddy. Come tell me what you think of this.” Delaney had the ’33 in the center of the floor. She gave the bike a good polish with a shop rag and admired the shine on the fuel tank. “It’s supposed to be a ride-in contest,” she explained, as Wyatt trotted over and circled the bike. “So it doesn’t have to look amazing. Just be as classic as possible.” He sat near the rear wheel and gave a short bark.
This, Delaney had learned, was something he did when he was interested. It was almost like he was trying to talk to her.
“You think it has a shot?”
Wyatt gave another short bark.
“Me, too.”
He hadn’t been as chatty about his dog bed, on the other hand. It took Delaney two weeks to get the bed over near the foot of the staircase. Well, not so much the bed, as Wyatt himself. Delaney had found out quickly that she could move the bed all she liked, Wyatt just wouldn’t follow it. For three nights he’d slept on the concrete in the storeroom instead of on the dog bed that Delaney had moved to just inside the doorway. Undeterred, she’d started over and put the dog bed back in its original place. The next night, she’d moved the bed only a couple of feet.
Pete’s acclimation plan eventually worked. It just took a lot longer than Delaney thought, as she had to move the bed in much smaller increments. Now Wyatt snoozed in his dog bed by the foot of the stairs and never went near the back room. So far, Delaney had been too afraid to take that last step of moving his bed up to the apartment. That was a huge leap. Wyatt never followed her up there and it wasn’t like she could move the bed in small increments up a staircase.
She tried every day, though. Wyatt would follow her command to come just to the foot of the stairs and there he’d stop. He’d sit at the bottom, shift his paws and whine while she climbed. That’s when the commands became useless and Delaney was unwilling to force his will. Who knows what trauma he’d suffered around these steps. Clearly the Dudes banned him from the apartment at some cost.
He didn’t like being alone, either. Every time Delaney went to the gym or out for groceries, she’d come home to ripped up trash, claw marks at the base of the front door and, once, a low shelf emptied of its contents, strewn about. Now the trash got emptied before she left and nothing lived on the low shelves. Plus, Wyatt always got a rawhide stick to chew on.
“By next month, I’m going to be itching to open that door, Wyatt.” Delaney looked at the closed bay. She’d kept it closed ever since Wyatt had come home with her, practicing Pete’s commands while they went for walks. Despite knowing that that training was good for Wyatt, Delaney always heard her father’s voice in the back of her head if she got frustrated at his pulling or his urges to run:You gotta let people be who they’re supposed to be, Pippie.
Anytime Wyatt seemed anxious and started tugging on the leash or when he wasn’t listening to her commands, Delaney had taken up the habit of singing to him. It happened by accident, really. She’d been busy working on Sean’s bike one afternoon and had started singing, like she and Dad used to do. It was a thing they had where, if the shop got too quiet, one of them would burst into song and the other would join in. Joining in was mandatory, whether you liked the song or not. Most of the time she and Dad liked the same music but sometimes they would irritate each other on purpose for humor’s sake and Dad would start belting out “Free Bird” or Delaney would do “Stairway to Heaven.”
“Who the hell doesn’t like ‘Free Bird’?” Dad had demanded the day he found out she hated it, somewhere around the age of twelve.
“Exactly the point,” Delaney had said. “It’s so overdone. There are way better Lynyrd Skynyrd songs.”
“Like what?”
“Like ‘Tuesday’s Gone.’”
“Alright. Alright. Can’t argue. And yet you like that sappy ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” he’d said in rebuttal. “There are way better Led Zeppelin songs.”
“Name one.”
“‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.’”
“I hate when you’re right.”
Delaney hadn’t sung since Dad died. But the morning after Wyatt’s fostering he was mooning around the shop, acting skittery near the front door, like if it was open he’d go running back to Sunny’s. Delaney let him pace awhile, kept using Pete’s commands, and sometimes he’d listen, sometimes he wouldn’t. Delaney started working on Sean’s bike and struck up “Take It Easy” with as much gusto as she could muster. She hadn’t planned it. She just remembered how good singing with Dad used to make her feel, no matter what was going on in her life, if school sucked or her mother wanted to visit or hormones were raging.
Delaney hadn’t expected it to work. But Wyatt’s ears had perked up and he’d stopped pacing. He came over by the Willy G, watched Delaney work on the carburetor as she sang.
As of yet, though, Delaney had been too afraid to try out either the commands or the singing with an open bay door. Those final pieces—up the staircase and opening the bay door—would be true tests. That is, unless someone adopted Wyatt before then. Sometimes Delaney forgot that she was only fostering him. The thought of someone else taking him home made her heart feel heavy.
She took a picture of the ’33 and sent it in a group text to Boom, Sal, Donny and Zip, just like she had when the motorcycle had been mysteriously returned.
She’s ready to be judged, was the caption.
The replies came in quickly, one after the other. Delaney glanced at her watch, calculated time difference and figured they’d all be at Gunny’s eating lunch right now.
Boom:Get ’er done Pippie.
Donny:Nobody stands a chance.
Sal:Sweet. Get pics of the Harleys while you’re there.
Zip:Make sure there’s carbon in the pipes, Squeaky.