He did not feel angry. This surprised him a little. He had expected to feel something sharper on the way back, the heat that comes after an insult, but all he found in himself was a kind of gray tenderness, like a bruise pressed gently to see how deep it went. The boy had been frightened. Walter had known fear when he saw it. He had seen it in young engineers facing a failed test, and he had seen it in his own mirror, in the weeks after Margaret's diagnosis.
Fear made people loud. It also made them cruel, and then ashamed, and then louder still to cover the shame.
Not a petting zoo, the boy had said. Walter almost smiled at that. In his time, he had been called a great many things by people who did not understand what he was doing. A dreamer. A stubborn old goat. A man who couldn't leave a perfectly good engine alone. No one had ever suggested he belonged in a zoo.
He pulled off at a lookout above the water and sat with the engine idling. The lake was the color of pewter. A freighter crept along the horizon, so slowly it looked painted there.
His hand, the one that had touched the hood, rested on his knee. He turned it over and looked at it. The knuckles were swollen, the skin spotted and thin. He thought of how the metal had felt under his palm, cool and impossibly smooth, and of the line beneath his fingertips, that long unbroken curve, rising and settling, rising and settling.
Margaret had made it with her thumbs.
He could still see her in the studio, thirty-seven years younger than he was now, hunched over a block of industrial clay the size of a small boat. She had worked on the shoulder line for eleven days. The designers kept telling her it was fine. The directors kept telling her it was fine. She kept scraping it back and starting again, because it was not right yet, and she could not say what right meant, only that she would know when her hands found it.
On the twelfth day, she stopped. She stepped back. She looked at it for a long time, and then she laughed, a short, startled laugh, as if the clay had told her a joke.
"There you are," she had said.
He had been standing in the doorway with a clipboard, pretending to check something about the hood hinge. He had understood in that moment, with the clean certainty of an engineer seeing a calculation resolve, that he was never going to love anything the way he loved the woman who could make that sound over a lump of gray clay.
Walter blinked, and the lake came back.
In the thirty-nine years after that, he had designed engines that powered a hundred million miles of road. He had won awards he kept in a closet. He had been called a legend in a magazine, which Margaret had read aloud in a grave, mocking voice until they both collapsed laughing. But the thing he would have traded all of it to keep was something simpler. It was the evening ritual of the two of them walking out to the driveway after dinner, each carrying a mug of tea, to stand beside whatever car they were testing that month. She would lay her palm on the fender. He would listen to the engine tick as it cooled. Neither of them said anything. They did not need to.
I just like to feel it, she had told him once. The line. You can't see a line the way you can feel one.
That was why he had put his hand on the Meridian. He had not intended it. He had stood in front of it, and the old ache had risen in him, and his hand had simply gone out, the way a hand goes out to steady someone who is falling.
He should have asked permission. He knew that. He was an old man in a rumpled jacket, and the boy had been within his rights to ask him to step back.
It was only the way he had asked.
Walter put the truck in gear and merged back onto the road. At a red light, he reached into his jacket pocket for his handkerchief, and his fingers closed around nothing. He frowned. He patted the other pocket. Then he glanced down at the lapel of his jacket, at the little worn spot where the cloth had thinned, and he understood.
The pin was gone.