"Stay close," Paula said, and took his hand, which she had not done in public
since he was eight, and which he allowed.
35
They were three steps inside the door when the room began to change. It did
not stop all at once. It stopped the way a field goes quiet, one bird at a time.
The man with the carburetor set his wrench down with care. The two on
stools stopped talking mid-sentence. Somebody near the coffee urn said,
"Well, now," in a voice that was not surprise so much as recognition arriving
late, and then Doyle Ketchum stood up from the bench at the far end of the
room, and the rest of the quiet finished itself.
Doyle was fifty-eight and built the way linemen are built, from the shoulders
down, with a gray beard trimmed short enough to fit under a helmet strap and
hands burned by weather and wire for forty years. He had carried Owen's
father's casket on the left side, front position, which in the arithmetic of
funerals meant something Owen understood even at eight. He came down the
length of the garage between the rows of bikes, not hurrying, and stopped in
front of Paula and looked at her the way you look at a road you used to drive.
"Paula," he said.
"Doyle," she said. "I didn't call ahead. I should have called ahead."
"You never had to call ahead to this room," he said, and then he looked
down, and his whole face changed, not softening exactly but settling, the way
a house settles onto a foundation it trusts. "You're Hollis's boy."
It was not a question. It was the thing the whole room had been waiting to
hear said out loud. Owen felt his mother's hand tighten once on his and then,
deliberately, loosen, which was her way of telling him this part was his.
"Yes, sir," Owen said.
Doyle went down on one knee. It cost him something — Owen could hear
the knee announce itself — and he did it anyway, so that they were eye to
eye. This was not a man being kind to a child. This was a man refusing to
36
talk down a hallway. "How old are you now, Owen?"
"Ten. Ten and a half in December."
"Ten and a half in December," Doyle repeated, grave as a census taker.
"Your daddy used to bring you here on Saturday mornings and sit you on
that stool by the tire machine and give you a rag and a bolt to polish, and
you'd polish it like it was going in an engine that had to run to heaven. You
remember that?"
"I remember the rag smelled like oranges," Owen said, and Doyle laughed
once, a real laugh that startled the room into smiling, and stood up with his
hand briefly on the top of Owen's head, the weight of it exactly like being
stamped.
"Oranges," he said to the room at large. "Hand cleaner. The boy remembers
the hand cleaner." Then he looked at Paula again, and his voice went to the
register it used for business. "You didn't drive across town on a school night
for the company. What do you need, Paula?"
She nodded at Owen. "He needs to show you something. He's found
something. And I need men I trust to look at it and tell me if I'm standing in
the right place, because the sheriff has told me where she has to stand, and
it's behind a line, and I understand her line. I need to know where yours is."
"Then we'll look," Doyle said, and turned. "Micah. Clear the long bench."
Micah Ferro was twenty-nine and thin as a welding rod, with forearms
mapped in pale burn stars. He had been Hollis Tate's apprentice at the diesel
shop from seventeen until the October night two years ago, and he had not, in
those two years, said much of anything to anybody about it. He moved now
without a word and swept the long bench clear with a rag, and laid down a
clean shop towel the length of it, white as a tablecloth, and Owen understood
37
that the towel was for him.
But Micah did not go back to his stool. He walked to the far corner of the
garage, where something stood under a gray cover beyond the last lamp, and
stood there a moment with his hand flat on the cover's shoulder, and then he
looked at Owen and said the first words Owen had ever heard directly from
him.
"You should see it first," Micah said. "Before the papers. It should come
first."
Paula made a small sound. Owen walked down the garage past the tire
machine and the stool that was still there, smaller than memory said, and
Micah drew the cover back slowly, from the front wheel up.
His father's motorcycle stood on its stand in the corner.
Owen had not seen it since the funeral, when it had stood in front of the
church with a wreath on the handlebars and his father's helmet on the seat,
and after that it had simply gone out of the world of visible things, the way
his father's boots had gone from the mat and his cup from the hook. He had
assumed it had been sold or given or taken. It had been here the whole time,
under a gray cover in a corner of the room his father had loved best in the
world, and it had not been sitting still.
It was cleaner than it had ever been in his father's life. That was the first