signing his name at the bottom of a page.
Owen nodded back.
That was all of it. No words crossed the room. Ruth, who missed nothing that
happened under her roof, pretended with great dedication to be very
interested in the pie case. Paula put her hand on Owen's back going past and
said nothing either, which from her was applause. Owen took out the
notebook in the booth while they waited for their food and wrote: MARCH
8. EMMETT SIKES, AT RUTH'S. WE NODDED. Under it, after a minute,
97
in smaller letters: TWO BOOKKEEPERS.
"What's a bookkeeper?" Paula said, reading upside down, which she could do
faster than most people could read right side up.
"Man who keeps the book true," Owen said. "Whether or not the yard's
crooked."
She considered that, nodded, and stole one of his fries, and for a while the
notebook stayed shut.
The money part had its own lawyer and its own room, and it finished in
March too, in the spirit of a month that had apparently decided to close
accounts. Owen was not in that room either. But Paula had a policy by then,
built out of one October and one November on a porch step: the boy gets the
whole of it, in order, in words that don't hide. So on a Sunday evening, with
the settlement papers in a folder on the table, she told him what the civil side
had made of his father's death, and Owen wrote the shape of it in the
notebook while she talked, because writing was how he listened all the way
down.
There was money for Paula, and money set aside for Owen's schooling, in a
trust with rules attached that Paula summarized as: "It's yours when you're
grown, and it can't be touched for foolishness, and college counts and so does
a trade." That had been her doing. She had told the lawyer, in front of Owen,
at the first meeting: "His daddy fixed things with his hands. If this boy wants
a school that teaches his hands, the money had better not have opinions about
it." The lawyer, who had come in with opinions, left without them.
But the parts Owen wrote largest were the parts that weren't money at all.
The settlement required a guardrail at the Elbow on County Road 12 — a
real one, galvanized steel on driven posts, the length of the curve and fifty
98
feet past it on both ends, paid for out of the Prescott side of the ledger, with
the county to maintain it after. Men from two counties had known about that
curve for thirty years. It had taken the particular mathematics of October 17
to get posts in the ground, and Owen did not write that thought, but he
thought it all the way through while the pencil stayed still, and Paula watched
him think it and did not hurry him.
And there was a scholarship. A trade-school scholarship, in his father's name
— THE HOLLIS TATE MEMORIAL AWARD, the papers called it, and
Owen read the name in the folder three times to be sure of the spelling,
because seeing his daddy's name in print in a lawyer's folder was a different
thing from seeing it on the shop calendar or the headstone. It would go every
year to a kid from the county who wanted to learn a trade with their hands.
The first recipient had already been chosen: Tessa Ibarra, seventeen, Deputy
Ibarra's niece, who had been rebuilding a '98 pickup's transmission in her
uncle's driveway since she was fifteen and wanted diesel school in the fall.
Owen wrote: FIRST ONE: TESSA IBARRA. TRANSMISSIONS. He
thought about a girl he had never met, two towns over, opening an envelope
with his daddy's name on it, and the thought did something complicated in
his chest that was not grief exactly, though grief was in it, the way a chord
has notes in it. His daddy would have approved of a transmission. His daddy
had held that a person who could fix one could fix most of what ailed the
world, the rest being electrical, which was witchcraft.
The rail crew came the third week of March.
Paula let Owen miss the morning of school for it, which she had never done
for any case thing, not the pleas, not the papers, and when he asked why this
one she said, "Because this one's not about court. This one's about the road."
Micah picked him up at seven. Paula had a shift she could not move and
99
arrived later, standing at the fence line in her scrubs while the crew worked.
The Elbow looked different in the morning than it did in Owen's memory,
and he understood standing there that his memory of it had only ever been
built out of one night and one afternoon with Chen and a measuring wheel.
In daylight it was just a curve in a county road, falling away west, with cedar
on the high side and a drop on the low side down to a dry creek bed. A pretty
place, if you came on it fresh. That was the worst of it, and he wrote nothing
about that.
The crew was a contractor out of the county seat: four men, a post driver on a
skid steer, a truck with the rails stacked like bright ribbons. They worked the
way his daddy had said real work worked — layout first, string line, marks in
orange paint — and then the driver started, and the sound of it went through