Chapter 2. What the Key Still Opens

Rae POV

I was twenty minutes late to Pruitt Cycle Works for the first time in nine years, and every man in the shop noticed.

"Long night?" Hook called from under a Road King, grinning. "Birthday boy liked his present?"

The whole shop knew about the Shovelhead. Half of them had lent me tools for it.

"He liked it," I said. "So did my sister."

I went to my bench and started tearing down a carburetor that didn't need tearing down. Nobody asked again. By lunch, though, the radio had been turned down, somebody had left a coffee at my elbow, and Gus Pruitt was standing in his office doorway with his reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair.

"Dempsey. A minute."

Gus had hired me at eighteen, when I walked in with Grandpa Walt's toolbox and told him I'd be the best mechanic he ever had. He laughed and gave me a weekend. I never left.

He shut the door. "Talk."

So I did. The bike, the bed, the deposit, the nursery, the free Saturdays. I said it the way I'd describe a cracked engine block: here's the damage, here's what's left.

Gus didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

"There's a flat over the shop," he said. "Two rooms. It's been empty since the last kid moved to Billings. Rent's whatever you say it is."

"Gus, I can pay—"

"I know you can pay. Pay me in not living on a nurse's couch." He picked up his phone. "And I'm going to have a word with Judge."

"Judge?" The only Judge I knew of ran the Black Pine Motorcycle Club, which owned this shop, half the tow contracts in the county, and the long fenced compound off Route 9 that nobody went into uninvited. "Why would Judge care?"

Gus looked at me like I'd asked why the sun cared about Tuesday. "Because you're ours, kid. Go eat something."

I didn't eat something. I went back to my bench and stared at the carburetor until the parts swam, because you're ours had landed somewhere under my sternum and stuck there. Nobody in my family had ever said it like that. Like it was obvious. Like it cost them nothing.

At four o'clock, Hook slid a key across my bench without a word. It had a strip of masking tape on it that said FLAT in Gus's chicken-scratch.

***

Saturday night, the whole town went to the Copper Fork Grange Hall for my sister's engagement party.

I went to my parents' house.

I parked two streets over and walked in through the back alley the way I had at sixteen. The kitchen still smelled like Brett's birthday cake. My house key went into the mailbox, exactly as requested.

Grandpa's little brass key went into the safe in Dad's office.

It turned like it had been waiting.

I told myself I'd only take what was mine. A folder labeled RAE in Mom's handwriting: birth certificate, school records, my apprenticeship papers. A long envelope in Grandpa Walt's square print, Rae — college — from Walt, fat with old bills Dad had never once mentioned. And on the bottom shelf, Grandma June's jewelry box, the walnut one with the inlaid pine tree that I'd been told was "lost in the move" when I was nine.

I pressed the third pine needle on the lid, the way Grandma had shown me. The bottom clicked. Her folded paper was still in there, stiff with a notary's stamp, exactly where she'd tucked it the summer before she died. If anybody ever says this box isn't yours, Rae-bird, you show them this.

I didn't unfold it. I closed the bottom again and held the box against my chest for a second.

Behind the jewelry box sat a brown pharmacy bottle with no pharmacy label. Just a strip of tape: Rae — vitamins.

I knew that bottle. Mom put one capsule beside my coffee every morning of my life and stood there until I swallowed it. Iron, she said. I was anemic as a kid. The capsules tasted like crushed aspirin and pine sap, and on the mornings I skipped them I felt strange all day, too awake, too hot, every sound in the house sharpened like a blade.

I hadn't taken one since Dad's text. For four days I'd felt that too-awake hum under my skin.

I looked at the bottle for a long time.

Then I did what Grandpa had shown once. I reached past the empty shelf and pressed the back wall of the safe, low and to the left, where the paint was worn shiny.

It gave under my fingers with a soft click.

Dad had owned that safe for eighteen years. I'd have bet my bike he never knew it had a false back.

Behind it sat a flat tin, the old kind tobacco used to come in. The same wolf-and-pine mark was pressed into the lid.

Inside were two things.

The first was a photograph, soft at the corners. A young woman I'd never seen, laughing, with a dark braid exactly like mine, holding a baby in a yellow blanket. Behind her stood a tall iron gate with the wolf and the pine worked into its center.

The second was an index card in Grandpa Walt's square print.

Rae-bird. If you're reading this, they finally pushed you out. Stop taking the capsules. Find the pines. Love you more than engines. — Grandpa

I read it four times standing in the dark of my father's office, with my sister's engagement party going on across town.

Then I put the bottle in my pocket, and the tin in my jacket against my heart, and I closed the safe.

***

Sunday, I moved into the flat over the shop.

I had five boxes, two suitcases and Grandpa's toolbox, and I was ready to carry all of it up the outside stairs myself. Then the rumble started at the end of the block, and seven motorcycles pulled up to the curb in a line so neat it looked rehearsed.

Black Pine. Leather cuts, a black pine tree stitched across every back.

Find the pines. There were about forty million pines in Montana, Grandpa. I told myself it was a coincidence and went to get the door.

"Heard you were moving," said Brick, the club's sergeant-at-arms, who was roughly the size of a vending machine and had once cried at a dog-food commercial in our break room. He took both suitcases without asking. "Where's the heavy stuff?"

"I can—"

"Course you can." He was already halfway up the stairs.

Tasha arrived with pizza and immediately forgot I existed. She'd spotted Hook, and Hook had spotted her, and within ten minutes she was laughing at everything he said and he was carrying boxes he'd already carried, just to walk past her twice.

By dark, the flat had a working fridge, a bed someone had assembled, three mismatched kitchen chairs and nine people eating pizza on the floor. The riders talked about carburetors and somebody's divorce and whether the Grizzlies had a shot this year. Nobody asked about Brett. Nobody asked about Kaylee. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a week. Somewhere around the third pizza I realized I hadn't checked my phone in an hour, and that the sharp, too-awake feeling humming under my skin wasn't entirely bad.

When they finally stood to leave, Brick hung back by the door.

"Clubhouse party Saturday," he said. "Bring your friend. Bring whoever. Judge wants to meet you."

"Me? Why?"

He shrugged one massive shoulder, but he didn't quite meet my eyes. "Wear boots. Stay close to the bonfire, not the back lot." A pause. "And don't be weird if you get stared at. Atlas is home."

Every rider still in the room went quiet.

Hook stopped chewing. Tasha looked from face to face.

"Who's Atlas?" I asked.

Nobody answered.