That's all. But that's all is sometimes a whole different life."
"How much?" Piper asked.
"Not a dime." Boon shook his head.
"I've got no degree, no license. I can't sell this thing.
I'm just finishing something I still owe." He didn't say who he owed it to, but his eyes drifted to the wooden chair in the corner of the shop, and Piper understood.
She sat up straight. For the first time in a very long time, there was a decision about her own body where the person deciding was her.
"Then do it," said Piper Larkin. "Starting today."
They agreed on a schedule. Every morning, while Mrs.
Larkin believed her daughter was at the rehabilitation center, Piper would come to the shop for two hours.
She wasn't lying entirely. She still went to the center.
She just cut her sessions short and used her own allowance to hire a taxi for the extra 40 minutes. Boon didn't disassemble the original braces, too risky if Mrs.
Larkin found out.
Instead, he did something crazier. He built an entirely new set of braces from zero based on the drawings in the leather notebook and precise measurements taken from Piper's legs.
The little repair shop on the old highway turned into a field laboratory. Boon called in every favor from 20 years in the trade.
His buddy, who built race cars up in Phoenix, shipped him tubes of 7075 aircraft-grade aluminum, the light but strong alloy used in airplane frames. The owner of the mountain bike parts store let him have a set of miniature oil-damped shock absorbers at cost.
For the padding, he cut sections from racing saddle liners, material engineered to endure hours of friction without blistering human skin. "Are you installing bicycle parts on my legs?"
Piper asked on the third day, watching him grind down a shock absorber. "I'm installing parts that work on your legs," Boon replied without looking up.
"That fancy company installed parts that photograph well on your legs. Which one would you rather have?"
And Piper burst out laughing.
The sound startled even her. She couldn't remember the last time she had laughed out loud.
The mornings at the shop settled into a rhythm of their own. Boon worked while explaining every detail in plain, rough-hewn language.
"This joint's like a door hinge. Mount it crooked and the door grinds the frame.
Weight's like cargo in a truck bed. Pile it in one corner and you snap the leaf springs."
And Piper, the girl who had sat mute through hundreds of consultations, drowning in jargon, understood for the first time what was actually happening to her own legs.