The Old Motorcycle (Part 1)

Everyone in the village called their grandfather Papi. He had been dead for eleven months before anyone opened his shed.

It wasn’t that the family was afraid of the shed, exactly. It was that the key had always lived on a nail in his kitchen, and nobody wanted to be the person who took it down. In the end it was Julie, on a Saturday in February, because the rain had stopped and she couldn’t think of a reason not to. She called her cousin Rafael, who lived four streets away and had nothing else to do.

The shed smelled of oil and old wood. The tools hung on the wall, each one inside its own painted square, so you could see immediately if one was missing. None was missing. Papi had never invented anything in his life, but for fifty years he had fixed everything on that street, and every tool had come home.

In the middle, under a gray cover, stood something shaped like a bicycle, but wider and much heavier.

Rafael pulled the cover off.

It was a motorcycle. Red, with a round headlight and a long leather seat, and dust half a centimeter thick on the tank. Both tires were flat. The left mirror was broken. Under the dust, the metal was still deep red.

“Honda,” Julie said. “Nineteen seventy-two. His.”

“You knew this was in here?”

“Everybody knew. I thought it was smaller.”

In the toolbox there was a notebook. Papi had written in it in pencil, in short lines, the way he wrote everything: dates, prices, weather. Julie found the last page. Rally, 1998. Second place. Next year.

She turned back. Rally, 1996. Rally, 1994. The same two words at the bottom of every one.

“The village rally is the first Sunday in August,” she said.

Rafael was still looking at the bike. “That’s six months.”

“Then we start next Saturday.”