remembers a house he has only seen from the road: the lit windows, in order,
and dark between them. He had been eight. It was a Friday, which mattered,
because Friday was the night his father rode home late from the co-op on the
motorcycle instead of in the truck — shop night, the men called it, when they
closed the garage and rode out to the lake road and back. His mother had
made meatloaf. He remembered the meatloaf because it had sat on the stove
under foil until long past midnight and because his mother, for months
afterward, could not make one, and then one day did, and cried standing at
the counter with the pan in her hands, and served it anyway, and that was the
night he understood that grief was not a thing that ended. It was a thing that
learned to sit at the table quieter.
The knock had come at eleven-forty. He knew the time because the kitchen
clock said so in his memory, big black numbers, when his mother opened the
door in her robe with her hand already flat against her own chest, the way
nurses do, the way people do when some part of them has already been told.
Deputy Tomás Ibarra had stood on the porch with his hat in both hands.
Owen remembered the hat more than the face — the hat turning slowly, the
brim going around and around in the deputy's hands like something being
wound down. Ibarra was not a stranger; he had gone to school with Hollis, he
came to the co-op for his patrol unit's oil changes. He said, "Paula," and
nothing else for a moment, and his mother said, "No," quietly, to the porch,
to the road, to the whole arrangement, and then she did the thing Owen
would remember longest of all: she reached behind her without looking and
7
found his hand, standing there in the hallway in his pajamas where he was
not supposed to be, and she held it hard enough to hurt, and neither of them
ever mentioned that it hurt, because it was the correct amount.
After that, the windows went dark for a stretch. He remembered the house
full of women from the church with casseroles wrapped in towels. He
remembered his father's boots by the door, still holding their shape, and an
aunt quietly carrying them away to a closet, and his fury at that, and how he
had gotten them back and put them by the door again, and how his mother
had seen and said nothing, and the boots had stayed there a year.
The funeral he remembered in pieces that had the shine of photographs. The
church too small, so the Riders stood outside along the walk in their leather,
forty men and a few women, engines off, helmets under their arms, silent as
a fence line. The cemetery grass was wet through his good shoes from the
morning's rain. Six of the Riders carried the coffin from the hearse to the
grave, Preacher and Tiny among them, walking the slow measured walk of
men carrying something heavier than its weight, and at the end, before they
lowered it, Tiny had put his palm flat on the lid the way Hollis used to touch
the door frame, and stood there a full five seconds with his head down, and
Owen, watching, had decided that when he was grown he would be the kind
of man whose friends did that. It seemed to him the entire point of a life,
arranged into one gesture.
What the county knew, it knew from one man. A trucker out of Del Rio had
come around the Elbow not four minutes behind it and found Hollis's
motorcycle down in the ditch and Hollis beyond it, and had stayed with him
until the ambulance came. But before that, cresting the rise east of the curve,
the trucker had passed a black SUV going the other way fast, too fast for
gravel shoulders and a wet bend, and he had seen it the way a man who
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drives for a living sees everything, in one sweep: front damage on the
passenger side, fresh and bright where the paint had gone; and the right
taillight cracked — he told the deputy twice, and the newspaper once, and
Owen read it until the words were memorized like scripture — cracked in a
shape like a forked river, like a branch of the Guadalupe drawn in red glass.
And a plate he had only half caught in his mirrors and the dark: 7K, and then
the rest gone.
A black SUV. Front passenger-side damage. A right taillight cracked like a
forked river. A plate starting 7K. That was the whole estate of the thing. The
county had run it for a while — bulletins, a stop at every body shop in three
counties, a segment on the news out of San Antonio that his mother made
him leave the room for — and then the leads had thinned the way leads do,
and the case had gone the color of old paper. Cold, the deputy called it, the
one time Owen heard him say it, at the co-op a year later, not knowing the
boy was in the parts cage with the ledger. "Cold isn't closed, son," Ibarra had
said to the mechanic who'd asked, and Owen, in the cage, had written it
down in the shop notebook out of pure reflex — COLD ISN'T CLOSED —
and underlined it twice. He kept the newspaper clipping folded into the back