The Colt 45 cap spun off and bounced across the concrete of the backyard pit, a tiny metallic clatter swallowed by the night. Buck Caldwell watched it go, or thought he watched it go, because the world had taken on that soft, swimming quality it got around the seventh or eighth pull from a forty-ounce bottle. He was sitting in a lawn chair he had dragged out from the garage, the webbing frayed and listing hard to starboard, and between his boots lay the spread of papers he had carried home from the shop that afternoon.
Blueprints. Eleven months of measuring, re-measuring, calling old buddies down at Warrior River, begging for favors, selling off a transmission he could have used for the truck. Eleven months of Elsie's silence on the subject, which was its own kind of scream.
He lifted the bottle and drank deep. The malt went down thick and warm and mean.
"You remember this one, Elsie?" His voice was a gravel truck grinding up a grade. He held up a sheet, squinting at it. The yard light buzzed overhead, throwing his shadow long across the weedy grass. "This is the wheelbase. Sixty-two and a quarter. You know what that's for? That's so the weight transfers clean off the line. No hop. No chatter. Just gone."
No answer from the dark kitchen window. No answer from anywhere.
He snorted and took another pull. The bottle was getting light. That was fine. He had two more in the cooler.
"I told you I was going to build it." He jabbed a thick finger at the paper. "I told you back in February. Down at Vinnie's, remember? You had your little plate of fried pickles, and I said, Elsie, I'm going to build one more. One more run. Just one. And you looked at me." He paused, and his jaw worked sideways, the way it did when something caught in his throat that was not beer. "You looked at me like I'd told you I was going to rob a bank."
He cackled at that, a short bark that scattered a grackle out of the oak tree. The bird complained and flapped off into the humid air. The night was heavy with it, with the smell of cut grass from the Hendersons' place next door and the faint perfume of Mrs. Pruitt's gardenias three houses east. A whole neighborhood sleeping, and him out here with his wreckage.
"Like I'd robbed a bank." He said it softer now. "Like you'd ever let me rob a bank."
The sheets rustled under his hand. He smoothed one out across his knee. There was the chassis layout, drawn in pencil so soft the lines feathered at the edges. He'd drawn it himself, lying on the living room floor on his stomach one Sunday while the Bears game played unwatched on the television. He'd measured the axle with a tape pulled from Elsie's sewing kit and never given it back, and she'd never asked for it, which had felt like permission at the time.
"Sixty-two and a quarter," he said again, like a man reading his own eulogy. "Quarter-inch tolerance. You know how hard that is? You know what kind of rear end you need? You need a quick-change, a Halibrand, real piece, not the stamped garbage they sell at Summit. I found one. Up in Muncie. Fella name of Riordin, got it off a midget car, Indianapolis, 1958. He's holding it for me. He was holding it for me."
His throat closed around the last word. He took another drink to clear it.
That was the thing about the quiet. It did not let you fix anything. It just sat there and waited for you to fill it.
He crumpled the wheelbase sheet in his fist. Threw it into the pit. The brick fire ring sat at the center of the backyard, ringed with stones Elsie had carried from the creek bed in a galvanized tub the summer Jase turned twelve, and there was still a half-inch of ash from the Fourth of July hot dog roast. The paper ball caught and flamed up, brief and bright, then folded into itself and went black at the edges.
"There you go," Buck said. "One quarter-inch down the drain."
He reached for another sheet. The intake manifold design, traced from a photo of a 1963 fueler that had run a 6.99 at Lions. He'd spent three nights on the phone with a guy in Bay City who rebuilt Hilborns, and the guy had finally agreed to sell him a pair of restored mechanicals for eight hundred dollars, which was a steal, and Buck had promised to drive up Tuesday to get them. That was before.
Before the doctor. Before the scan. Before the word that started with g and ended in ma.
He set the manifold design on fire with his Zippo. The flame crawled across the paper, eating the penciled runners, and he watched the rubber cement sealer bubble and spit. The smoke was sharp and chemical, and he waved it away from his face with one hand.
"Eight hundred dollars," he muttered. "And the gaskets alone are four hundred. You know what kind of dough four hundred dollars is? That's the water bill for a year. That's Jase's birthday. That's your little trip to Shipshewana you been jawing about since April."
He laughed again, and this time it came out sideways, more of a cough.
"You wanted to go to Shipshewana." He pointed at the window, at the dark square of kitchen where she'd stood a thousand times with a dish towel over her shoulder. "You wanted to look at yard art and eat that funny cheese with the horseradish in it and sit on a bus for six hours with a bunch of women in matching T-shirts. You had it all planned. You had the flyer on the fridge."
His voice cracked. He drank to plaster over it.
"But me, I couldn't let you have that. No sir. I had to go and build a car."
He pulled the fuel system schematic into his lap. This one was printed, clean lines from a guy on a forum, someone in Tallahassee who ran a nostalgia top fuel site and had been willing to fax a copy for the cost of the call. Buck had stared at that schematic for hours, tracing the fuel line path with his thumbnail until the thumbnail wore thin. He'd dreamed about it. He'd dreamed about the sound, the scream of a blown small-block on the launch, the way the front end climbs and the horizon tilts.
He held the corner of the schematic to the Zippo flame and watched it catch. The fire climbed the page like a fuse.
"Jase called today," he said to no one. The paper curled and blackened in his grip, and he had to drop it into the pit before it burned his fingers. "Jase called to tell me he'd be down Friday. For the appointment. He says, Dad, I can take a couple days. I can drive in Thursday night. I can be at the house for the, the meeting."
He could not say it. The word for the meeting. The word for what the doctor did.
"And I said, Jase, don't you trouble yourself. I said, your mother and I got it handled. I said, you stay up there and do your job. We don't need you down here for every little thing."
He took a long drink. The bottle was nearly empty now. He could feel it in his arms, the way they had gone loose and uncertain at the elbows, the way his thoughts had taken on that sliding, careless tumble.
"But you and me," he said, and his voice dropped low enough that the grackles would have strained to hear it. "You and me both know that ain't why I said it."
The pit crackled. Another sheet caught from the first and went up fast, a sheet he had forgotten the name of, something about brake bias or wheelie bars, gone in a flicker.
He had said it because Jase did not need to see his old man falling apart in a lawn chair drinking Colt 45 and burning his dream one page at a time. Jase had enough of his own life. Jase had the insurance job and the new house and the wife and the kid on the way, Elsie said, though Jase had not confirmed and would not confirm and would probably not confirm until the baby was in kindergarten. Jase did not need to drive six hours south to find his father weeping into a forty-ounce like some country song cliché.
"I said, don't you come." Buck held the bottle up to the yard light, gauging what was left. Two fingers, maybe three. "I said it because I'm a stubborn old fool, is what I said it for. Because that's what Caldwell men do. We sit in our own mess and we stew."
He dropped the bottle into the grass. It thudded and rolled an inch, then settled against the leg of the lawn chair.
"You remember when his mother left?" He was talking to Elsie, but his eyes were on the dark window. "When Jase was, what, fourteen. Fifteen. She got on the bus and went to her sister's down at Terre Haute and that was that. And I sat right here in this chair, and I drank, and I did not call no one. I did not ask for help. I just let her go."
The pit popped. A knot of pitch in some old scrap of two-by-four that had survived from the last fire.
"And I raised him. I raised him right. I put him through school. I taught him to turn a wrench. I sat in the stands at every basketball game until he told me to stop coming to the basketball games. And I did it alone, Elsie. I did it in this yard, in this chair, in this town, because that's what Caldwell men do. We do not ask."
He picked up another sheet. The chassis layout, the big one, the one he had traced from a frame Buck had measured with a plumb bob and a level back in March, out in the barn behind the garage, the barn nobody used anymore except for storage and one barn cat named Donut Rat who came and went as he pleased. The lines were careful. The lines were the best thing Buck had drawn in forty years of drawing lines.
"Elsie," he said, and his voice was a wreck now, a tractor stuck in mud, spinning and going nowhere. "I am not going to build this car."
He held the chassis sheet up to the light, studying it.
"I am not going to build it because there is no there to build it toward. You understand that, don't you? There is no Warrior River in October. There is no quarter-mile. There is no Christmas tree and no green light and no run. There is just a doctor in a clean office telling me what kind of time I got left, and him using soft words so I won't punch him, and me sitting in this chair afterwards trying to remember how to start the truck."
The chassis sheet trembled in his grip. He did not light it. He folded it once, carefully, the way you fold a flag, and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He felt the corner of it press against his chest.
"This one I keep," he said. "This one and the bodywork print, that's it. That's all the pieces of me that don't go in the fire tonight."
He pulled the bodywork print out of the stack. The lines were cleaner than his own, drawn on a computer by a young guy over at the community college in the design program, a kid who had been a customer at the garage for years and had offered to draft Buck's body lines as a favor. Two weeks of work, free of charge. Buck had promised him tickets to Warrior River. Buck had promised him the chance to see the car run.
He looked at the bodywork print for a long time.
"I'm sorry, kid," Buck said. "I'm sorry I made you waste your time."
He lit the corner. The fire ran up the page, fast and hungry, and he held it until the flame reached his fingers and then dropped it, swearing, shaking his hand. The print landed face up in the pit and curled into a black husk.
He sat back. The yard light buzzed. Somewhere down the street a dog was barking at nothing, the steady three-bark cadence of a bored beagle.
"I keep the chassis and the bodywork kid's prints," he said, as if clarifying the terms of his own surrender. "I burn the rest. I burn the rest because I cannot leave them in a stack in the barn for Jase to find. Jase will find them. Jase finds everything. And he will look at them and he will try to finish it for me, because that is the kind of son I raised, the kind who tries to finish things."
He reached for the cooler. He had to lean hard to reach it, and the lawn chair groaned and listed further, and for a moment he thought it would tip him onto his back in the grass. He righted himself. He fished out the second forty-ounce. The cap came off with a hiss.
"You know what Jase said to me on the phone?" He drank. "He said, 'Dad, there's a guy at my office, his father had the same thing, and he's five years out now, they're doing trials up at Indy.' And I said, Jase, I appreciate that. And he said, 'Mom told me to tell you she loves you.' And I said, all right. And he said, 'I'm going to call you Thursday.' And I said, you do that, son."
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"And then I hung up the phone and I went out to the barn and I sat down on an overturned five-gallon bucket and I cried for an hour like a baby in a damn barn."
The bottle rose and fell against his knee, a slow pendulum.
"Elsie, I have been a hard man. I have been a hard man for sixty-three years. I have fixed more cars than I can count. I have raised a boy alone. I have not asked for help. I have not asked for pity. I have not asked for a damn thing from anybody, because Caldwell men do not ask."
He stopped. The beagle had stopped. The night had gone so quiet he could hear the lamp's filament humming in its housing.
"But I am asking you now," he said, and his voice was so low it barely stirred the air. "I am asking you, wherever you are. I am asking you if I was wrong to start this thing. I am asking you if I had a right to spend the last good months of my life chasing a quarter-mile of asphalt and a green light."
The pit glowed dull orange at the bottom, a small pile of ash and ember and the black skeletons of his drawings. A breeze moved through the yard, and the oak tree dropped an early acorn onto the concrete with a hard tap. Buck flinched.
"I had it bad," he said. "I had it bad from the time I was nineteen years old. I had it bad and I never told you. I never told you it was the only thing that made me feel like the world was small enough to hold."
He took another drink. The second bottle was getting low.
"I had a right," he said, answering himself at last. "I had a right to want one more run. I had a right to want to hear that sound one more time. I had a right to lie on the living room floor and draw quarter-inch tolerances on the back of a Sears catalog while the Bears lost to the Lions."
He nodded to himself. He set the bottle on the concrete beside the chair.
"That is my answer," he said to the dark window, to the kitchen where she was not, to the street where no one could hear him. "I had a right. And I am sorry I did not get there."
He stood up. The chair scraped concrete. He swayed, caught himself on the back of it, and for a moment the whole yard tilted and then steadied.
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the folded chassis sheet. He held it for a long moment. Then he tucked it back in, patted it once, and turned toward the house.
The front door stuck the way it always did in late summer, swollen against the frame. Hollis Pratt hit it with the flat of his palm, and the wood gave with a groan, and the smell of the house came out at him: stale air, and beneath it the faint green undertone of old carpet, and deeper still the ghost of a dozen meals cooked in the same aluminum pot.
He stepped inside and pulled it shut behind him. The darkness of the living room was thicker than the darkness outside, and he stood for a moment, hand still on the knob, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Somewhere deeper in the house, the refrigerator hummed its low, faithful note.
Maren Holloway was not in the kitchen. He could see the dim shape of the table, the chair pushed back at the angle she always left it, and the window over the sink where a thin line of streetlight fell in a pale stripe across the linoleum. The chrome clock on the wall showed 11:47 in numerals that had once glowed green and now glowed only when they felt like it.
"Maren." His voice came out thicker than he meant. He cleared his throat. "Maren, I need to talk to you."
She answered from the hallway. "I heard you come in. I've been in the hallway for ten minutes. I was giving you a chance to decide whether you wanted to be a man about it or whether you wanted to go back outside and finish the bottle."
He made his way down the hall, one hand on the wall, the paint tacky under his palm. She was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, arms folded, the hallway light behind her making a halo of the loose hairs at her temple. She had changed into the housecoat she wore when she was through being seen for the day. Her face was unreadable.
"You got your shoes on the rug," she said.
He looked down. He had. He stepped back onto the hardwood.
"Come inside," she said. "If you're going to tell me something I don't want to hear, you can at least tell me in a room with a door."
He followed her into the bedroom. She did not turn on the overhead. She clicked on the lamp on her side of the bed, the one with the yellow shade that made the room look like an old photograph. She sat on the edge of the mattress. She did not pat the spot beside her. She waited.
Hollis sat in the chair by the dresser, the one that held the stack of her unread library books and the saucer of spare change. He could smell her hairspray from here, the same brand she had used since 1987, and beneath it the lavender sachet she kept in the sweater drawer.
"I lied to you," he said.
She did not move. "I know you did."
"I lied to you about a lot of things. About the engine. About the backfire. About what happened at the shop."
"You didn't lie about what happened at the shop. You left out the part that mattered. There's a difference, and we both know it, and I'm going to need you to stop pretending you don't know which is which."
He rubbed his face with both hands. The scar on his left cheek pulled tight against his knuckles, the way it always did when he pressed. The skin there was smooth and wrong, a patch of new country grafted onto old.
"It wasn't a backfire," he said.
"I know."
"It was set. Somebody set it. Somebody put a rag in the intake and lit it and meant for the building to go."
"I know that too, Hollis."
He looked at her. She was looking at her own hands, folded in her lap, the knuckles pale.
"How long have you known?"
"Since 1986."
The room got very quiet. The refrigerator note came through the wall like a held breath. He could hear the clock on the kitchen wall ticking, and somewhere outside a dog barked twice and stopped.
"Maren."
"I was there, Hollis. I was there when they told you in the hospital that the fire marshal had ruled it suspicious. I was there when they told you they were opening an investigation. I was there the night you came home and sat on the back step and told me it was just an engine backfire and I let you tell me that because I knew you needed to tell yourself something first."
He stood up. The chair legs scraped the carpet. He sat back down.
"It was meant for Jase," he said.
"Yes."
"It was meant for Jase because Jase was the one who signed the variance. Jase was the one who let the Lukens build on the easement. Jase was the one who made the Lukens enough money to matter to the kind of people who matter."
"Yes."
"And I took the fall for it because Jase asked me to. Because Jase looked at me in the hospital with his face all burned and his eyes all wet and said please, and I said yes."
"Yes."
He pressed his palms together hard, knuckle to knuckle, until the bones ached.
"I have been carrying that lie for thirty-eight years," he said. "I have been letting you think I was the fool who got caught in his own backfire. I have been letting Elsie think her son was innocent. I have been letting Jase think he got away with it. I have been walking into the diner every morning and looking at that man and knowing that the fire that took my face was meant to take his."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you make me tell you?"
"Because you would have told me when you were ready. Because making a man like you talk is like trying to start a diesel in January. Because I figured you had your reasons and your reasons were probably good enough for the time being."
"They weren't good enough."
"No. They weren't. But they were yours."
She looked up at him then. Her eyes were dry and steady, and there was nothing soft in them, but there was nothing hard either. She looked at him the way she had always looked at him, the way she had looked at him on the day he came home from the hospital with half a face and a paper bag of pills, the way she had looked at him on the morning they buried his mother, the way she had looked at him last Tuesday when he came in from the yard smelling of a pour he should not have poured.
"I am not going to forgive you for it," she said. "I want you to know that. I am not going to sit here and tell you it's all right. It isn't all right. You let me love you for thirty-eight years with a lie in the middle of us, and that is not all right."
"I know."
"But I am also not going to leave you over it. I want you to know that too. I didn't stay for the lie, and I am not leaving for the truth. I stayed for the man who thought he had to carry it, and I am staying for the man who finally set it down."
He could not speak. He tried twice and failed twice and the third time what came out was a sound he had not made since he was a boy, a low and broken thing that lived in the back of the throat.
She reached over and took his hand. Her fingers were cool and dry, and her grip was the grip she had always had: firm, practical, unsentimental. She did not pat him. She did not stroke him. She held him the way you hold a wrench when you mean to use it.
"We'll figure out what to do about Jase in the morning," she said. "Tonight you are going to wash your face and drink a glass of water and lie down, and in the morning we are going to sit at that kitchen table and decide whether Jase Caldwell is the kind of man who gets told the truth or the kind of man who gets shown it."
"Okay."
"And you are going to give me back that chassis sheet."
He reached into his shirt pocket and handed it over. She took it without unfolding it, folded once more, and slid it into the pocket of her housecoat.
"That stays with me now," she said. "You can have it back when you've earned it."
"Yes."
"Say it back to me."
"Yes, Maren."
"Good."
She let go of his hand. She stood up. She walked to the bathroom and turned on the tap, and the sound of the water came through the open door, and he sat in the yellow lamplight and let the sound wash over him. The scar on his face pulled once, then settled. The clock ticked. The dog outside barked once more, farther off now, and did not bark again.
She came back with a wet washcloth and pressed it into his hand.
"Wipe your face," she said. "You smell like a campfire and bad decisions."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't call me ma'am. We've been married forty years. You can call me Maren or you can call me honey or you can call me nothing, but you cannot call me ma'am in my own bedroom at a quarter to midnight on a Tuesday."
"Yes, Maren."
"Better."
She turned off the lamp. She got into bed. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. He sat in the dark for a long moment, listening to her breathing even out, and then he stood, and he undressed, and he got in beside her. The mattress dipped. Her hand found his under the sheet.
"Hollis."
"Yes."
"Thank you for telling me."
He did not answer. He did not need to. He closed his eyes, and the dark behind them was, for the first time in thirty-eight years, the same dark as the dark around him.
The confession sat between them like a third body in the bed.
Elsie Caldwell had heard it. Not all of it, just the last of it, the part that carried, the part Maren had not bothered to lower her voice for because Maren did not lower her voice for anyone, least of all for the kind of hurt that had lived in her house that long. The kitchen was dark. The basement stairs were dark. The hallway that ran along the back of the house was dark. Elsie had been in the hallway, on her way to bed, and she had stopped with one hand on the wall and one hand on the back of a dining chair she had moved there years ago so she would have something to hold when the floor tilted, and she had listened because listening was what she did, because listening was how she had survived forty-six years of marriage to a man who kept the worst of himself in a tin box under the workbench.
Jase was in the hallway too.
He had not meant to be. He had come in through the back door, the one with the loose latch, the one that had needed weather stripping since the first autumn he could remember. His mother's house smelled the way it had always smelled, warm air and bacon grease and the faint sweet undertone of the lavender sachets his mother tucked into the linen closet, and he had stood in the mudroom for a moment with his coat still on because the coat was his father's coat, the canvas barn coat with the flannel lining, and he had not yet had the heart to take it off.
He could hear the television in the front room. He could hear his mother moving in the kitchen. He could hear the particular silence that fell when Maren Holloway stopped talking, which was not silence at all but a kind of held breath, and he had moved toward the kitchen because he was hungry, because he had driven six hours from the city without stopping except for gas, because the funeral had been that morning and the reception had been that afternoon and the receiving line had been that evening and he had not eaten since a piece of dry pound cake at the church.
Then he heard Maren's voice. Not the words, not at first. Just the shape of the words, low and even and stripped of everything soft. He knew that voice. He had heard it at the diner counter, at the post office, at the gas pumps, the voice Maren used when she was done being polite. He had stopped at the mouth of the hallway. He had not meant to stop. He had stopped the way a man stops at the edge of a hole he does not yet see.
Then the words came through the wall.
Not all of them. The plaster was old and thick, and the heating duct ran between the kitchen and the hallway, and most of what Maren said dissolved into a murmur that Jase could feel in his sternum without parsing. But the last of it came through, the part about the floor, the part about the foot of her bed, the part about the circle in the wood, and Maren's voice had risen just enough on the last sentence to make the words legible, and Jase had heard them, and the hearing of them had turned his legs to water under the canvas coat.
His mother was standing three feet away from him in the dark hallway. She had not seen him. She had her hand on the dining chair and she was not breathing, the way people stop breathing when they are trying to hear something they know they should not hear. Jase could see the pale blur of her face in the light from the streetlamp that came through the window at the end of the hall, and he could see that her mouth was open, just slightly, the way his father's mouth used to open when Buck Caldwell was working under a car and a bolt did not want to come loose.
He did not say anything.
He turned. He walked back down the hallway toward the mudroom, and his shoes made no sound on the carpet runner because the carpet runner was old and thin and the floorboards under it were the original pine, the kind that gives, and he made it to the mudroom without his mother hearing him. He took the coat off. He hung it on the hook by the door, the hook that had been his father's hook, the hook that was slightly higher than the others because Buck had been slightly taller than Elsie and had hung his own coat on his own hook for forty-six years without once asking Elsie to reach it for him.
He zipped the coat into his duffel bag.
He did not know why he did that. He was not thinking. His hands were doing the thing his mind had decided without consulting the rest of him, the way hands do when the mind has stepped out of the room. The duffel bag was on the floor of the mudroom where he had dropped it when he came in. He unzipped it. He put the coat in. He left the zipper half open because his hands were shaking and the small metal tab kept slipping out of his fingers.
He went back into the hallway.
His mother had not moved. She was still at the dining chair with her hand on the back of it and her face turned toward the kitchen, and from where he stood he could see that her eyes were open and that they were wet, but she was not crying, not yet, she was still in the part before the crying, the part where the body decides whether crying is the appropriate response or whether something else is, and Jase knew from watching her for thirty-one years that the decision took a while.
He went past her. He was three feet from her. He could have touched her shoulder. He did not.
He went into the front room and got his father's spare ignition key from the top of the bookshelf, where it had sat in a coffee mug with a chip in the rim since the last time his father had driven the pickup truck and not Buck Caldwell, which was never, but the key was there because that was where keys went in that house, and his mother had put it there after the funeral because she had not known what else to do with it.
He went back into the hallway. His mother had moved. She was sitting in the dining chair now, both hands in her lap, and she was looking at the floor, and she did not look up when he passed.
He went out the front door. The screen door banged behind him, the way screen doors bang in houses that have been lived in for fifty years, and he did not close it softly because his hands were shaking too hard to close anything softly.
He got into the truck.
The truck was a 1987 Chevrolet, silver and blue, two-tone, the paint gone dull along the hood where his father had rested his forearms while he waited for engines to turn over. The bench seat was split down the middle and patched with duct tape on the driver's side, and the steering wheel was wrapped in leather that had worn smooth in the places where Buck's hands had gripped it. The key went into the ignition. The truck had been parked long enough that the engine turned over twice before it caught, and the sound of it was the sound of his childhood, the sound of being picked up from school, the sound of being driven to the lake, the sound of every errand and every chore and every late summer night his father had ever taken him anywhere at all.
Jase put the truck in gear. He pulled out of the driveway. He did not turn on the headlights. He drove two blocks with the parking lights only, and then he turned onto Route 9, and the highway was empty at that hour, the way highways in small towns are empty at that hour, and the only lights he passed were the lights of the diner, which was dark except for the light over the back door, which was always on because Maren Holloway had said for twenty years that the light over the back door was cheaper than a locksmith and three times as effective.
He did not stop at the diner. He did not think about the diner. He thought about the floor of his mother's bedroom and the circle in the wood and the foot of the bed and the sound of Maren's voice saying the last part out loud, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked under his grip, and the scar on his face pulled once, then settled.
The highway ran south for six miles and then turned east at the old gas station, the one with the busted sign, and from there it was another four miles to the county line and another eight to the first town that was not his town, and Jase drove all of it without turning on the radio because the radio in the truck had been broken since 1998 and his father had never fixed it because fixing it would have meant admitting he had not been the one to break it, and the only cassette player in the truck had eaten a tape of Merle Haggard in 2003 and the tape was still in there, and Jase could hear it sometimes when the road was rough, a faint tinny ghost of a fiddle under the engine noise.
He drove until the sun came up.
The sun came up over a stretch of flat field that he did not recognize, and the field was planted in something he did not recognize either, and the truck was running low on gas, and the duffel bag was on the seat beside him with the canvas coat zipped inside it, and the key to the truck was in his pocket, and the key to his mother's back door was on the same ring because keys had always traveled on the same ring in his family, and he pulled over at a gas station that was not his father's gas station and he sat in the truck and he did not get out.
He sat there for a long time. He watched the sun climb. He watched the gas station attendant come out and start the coffee in the window and sweep the lot with a push broom that had seen better days. He watched a woman in a green coat come out of the station office and light a cigarette and look at the sky and then go back inside. He watched all of this with the engine off and the windows down and the morning air coming in cold and smelling of diesel and wet pavement.
He thought about calling his mother.
He did not call his mother.
He thought about driving back. He thought about the screen door banging. He thought about his mother in the dining chair with her hands in her lap. He thought about the light over the back door of the diner, which was always on, which was cheaper than a locksmith and three times as effective.
He thought about his father.
He thought about his father in a way he had not thought about his father since he was eleven years old and his father had not come home from the shop until well after dark and his mother had not put dinner on the table and he had sat on the front steps in the cold until the truck pulled in and his father had gotten out and walked past him without speaking and gone into the house and shut the door, and Jase had sat on the steps for another hour because he did not know what else to do, and after that hour his mother had come out and sat beside him and put her arm around his shoulders and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and they had sat there together in the dark until the dog next door started to bark.
He thought about the scar on his face. He thought about the scar on Maren's bedroom floor. He thought about the difference between the two, and the sameness of the two, and the way the difference and the sameness were both going to live in his mother's house from now on, in the dining chair, in the hallway, in the bed where Maren and her husband had lain that night with her hand on his and the confession still between them.
He started the truck. He pulled out of the gas station. He turned north.
He did not know why he turned north. He did not question it. He drove north for seven miles, and then he turned onto a gravel road that he did not recognize, and the gravel road ran along a creek he did not recognize, and the creek was running high with the spring melt and the sound of it was the only sound in the truck besides the engine and the faint tinny ghost of the fiddle.
He pulled over. He turned off the engine. He got out. He stood beside the truck and he looked at the creek and he breathed the air, which smelled of cold water and wet willow and the particular green smell of spring in a place he had never been.