But it also matched something else.
Something older.
Something Jimmy remembered from another man who once worked in a different corner of the same garage.
A man whose hands had moved with that same certainty.
Jimmy put down the socket wrench for the second time that morning.
He walked toward Sky.
He stopped behind her and studied the image forming on the tank.
One by one, the other men noticed where Jimmy was standing.
The garage grew quiet again.
“What is that?” Jimmy asked.
Sky did not stop painting.
“The Hart family emblem.”
Same steady voice.
“Luther designed it.”
Her hand moved.
“I’ve never put it on anything before.”
A pause.
“It felt like it belonged here.”
Jimmy studied the shape.
He recognized it.
He had seen it once, years earlier.
A rough drawing on notebook paper.
Luther Hart had been sitting at a table in the back of this same building during a long meeting, working on it while explaining it to Gregory and several others.
“It’s going to be the thing that means us,” Luther had said.
That was how Luther spoke.
As though things could be simple and enormous simultaneously.
“All of us. Where we come from. What we’re made of.”
He had never finished it.
He disappeared before he ever put the emblem onto anything permanent.
“Did Luther ever tell you about this?” Jimmy asked.
“He showed me the sketch.”
Sky added another stroke.
“I was twelve.”
“He said someday he was going to put it on something that deserved it.”
Another line appeared.
“He never got to.”
The garage was completely silent.
Twenty-eight men.
No sound.
“No,” Jimmy said softly.
“He didn’t.”
Sky stopped moving the brush.
She did not set it down.
Her back remained toward Jimmy, so he could not see her face.
“Is he…”
Her voice changed.
Still steady.
But the steadiness was working harder now.
“Did you know, I mean… do you know what…”
“We don’t know everything,” Jimmy said.
He chose his words carefully.
“We know he’s gone.”
Sky stayed still.
“We’ve known that for four years.”
Jimmy paused.
“But we don’t know all of it.”
The silence stretched.
Then Sky started painting again.
The next line was as clean as every line before it.
But her shoulders shifted.
Only slightly.
Something released.
Not collapsed.
Not broke.
Released.
The way a person finally lets out a breath they have been holding too long.
“Okay,” she said.
Nothing else.
But Jimmy heard fourteen months inside that one word.
A seventeen-year-old alone with the worst kind of uncertainty.
Moving from place to place.
Carrying a zippered case of brushes.
Carrying one oversized denim jacket.
Finally arriving somewhere that could answer even part of a question she had been carrying.
Jimmy returned to the Softail.
He picked up his wrench.
He said nothing else.
Some moments did not need anything else.
Slowly, work resumed.
And at the bench, Skyla Hart painted.
Her brush moved the way Luther’s had.
As if it knew where it was going before she did.
As if the image were not being created but remembered.
Gregory stood in the doorway to the back room watching her.