He thought about that sometimes, in the ordinary years. About how quiet the station was, and how the quiet had not been the absence of the story but its conclusion. The pumps ticked. The chargers hummed. Doris argued with a bread vendor about cinnamon rolls with the seriousness of a treaty negotiation. Teenagers who had not been born when the shard went into its frame bought fuel and complained about gas prices to the man who set them, the way their grandparents might have complained to his father about the price of a fan belt across the road, in a shop that no longer stood.
It was, by every measure that mattered to him, finished.
Then, one Christmas, there was ice on the lot.
It came in the night before Christmas Eve, a thin, bright, treacherous skin over the asphalt. The temperature stayed below freezing all day. Darius salted the walk himself in the morning, over Doris's objections, and again in the afternoon, and the sky went the color of wet newspaper, and the light over Harrison Boulevard came on early.
He was in the office, going over the week's receipts with his reading glasses on, when he heard it: not the sound exactly, but the shape of the sound. A vehicle going wrong. Tires losing their argument with the ice. A clipped impact, metal and concrete, short and final.
And then glass.
A teenager, driving too fast for the conditions because seventeen is an age at which conditions are something that happen to other people, had come down Harrison and turned in too hot, and the truck had slid, long and helpless, across the lot. It clipped the decorative barrier by the chargers. The impact knocked a landscaping brick loose from the top course.
The brick took flight.
It went through the front window of West Ridge Fuel in a bright, exploding star of glass, almost exactly where another brick had gone, years before, on a bright afternoon, in front of witnesses.
The boy was out of the truck before Darius reached the door.
Seventeen, tall in the unfinished way of boys that age, his face gone white under the lot lights, his hands up and empty and shaking, not in surrender but in the simpler terror of a person watching his whole life tilt. The truck sat crooked against the barrier with its hazard lights blinking. Glass covered the front walk and glittered on the ice. Somewhere inside, the alarm was doing its work, and Doris was already moving, already on the phone, already Doris.
"I'm sorry," the boy said. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'll pay for it. I swear I'll pay for it, I have a job, I work at the car wash, I can pay for it."
"You hurt?" Darius asked.
"What?"
"Are you hurt?"
The boy stared at him, thrown completely off the script he had been rehearsing since the slide began. "No. I don't think so. My shoulder, from the belt, maybe, but no."
"Anyone else? In the truck, on the lot, anybody walking?"
"No. It was just me. There's nobody. I checked, I swear I checked, that's the first thing I did."
"Then we start there," Darius said.
He walked the lot once, all the same, because starting there meant making sure and not merely believing. No one was bleeding. No one was under anything. The window was a window, and windows, as he had cause to know, cost money, and money was the most replaceable thing that had been in the building.
The boy followed him at a distance of two paces, apologizing in installments. "You're not calling police?" he asked at last, in the tone of a person who has been braced for a blow and does not trust its absence.
"You damaged a building with a vehicle," Darius said. "I'm definitely calling police. But first we make sure nobody is bleeding. Police second. Ambulance not required, apparently. Paperwork for everybody."
"Oh," the boy said. "Okay. Okay, that's fair."
"Call your parents," Darius said. "Then call your insurance company, if it's your truck. If it's your father's truck, call him first and the insurance company second, and let me know when you've done it, because he is going to want to hear the order of those calls from you and not from me."
The police came. One cruiser, one officer, a woman with frost on her breath and a flashlight she used the way Doris used a register, as an extension of a general refusal to be hurried. She took the report on the hood of her car. The boy told the truth in the order it had happened, which turned out to be the whole of the law's interest in the matter. Insurance exchanged its courtesies with insurance. Nobody screamed. Nobody invented a trespasser, or a break-in, or a weapon no one had seen. Nobody claimed the lot under a covenant. The glass was swept before midnight into a dumpster that was, the record should show, properly screened.