Chapter 7

The line was four words long and it had a date beside it.

Brody S. - 12 - license + rod - mama cried.

July 16. Sixteen summers back.

Sizemore stood at the hood of his own truck with the notebook open in his hands and read it eleven or twelve times. There was a way out of it. There was always a way out of it. Brody was not an uncommon name in East Tennessee. Half the county had a Brody in it. He looked at the page above and the page below, and every other line was a different child - a girl, a boy, a name he knew from a ball field, a name he knew off the bait shop wall.

But his thumb was resting on his own.

"You want to explain this?" he said. His voice came out wrong, high in the middle.

Hollis Renfro stood up off the trailer tongue for the first time in thirty minutes. He walked up the ramp slowly, the way an old man walks when his knees have carried him through forty-one years of mail routes, and stopped six feet away.

"It's a record," he said. "That's all it's ever been."

"That's my name."

"Yes."

"You don't know me."

"I know your mother."

Sizemore's face did something complicated. "What?"

"Darlene. She worked the hospital kitchen on days and the chicken plant on nights, that year. Your daddy left in March and didn't send anything back. I carried that route. I know every box on it."

"Don't-"

"July, you turned twelve. She brought you down here on a Saturday morning and stood at the top of the ramp with her purse in both hands and asked me if it cost anything. I said it didn't. I bought the license and a rod, and I wrote it down, because I wrote all of them down. She cried in the truck before she started it. I saw it from the ramp. That's why the line says that."

The cicadas had stopped. Sizemore couldn't remember them stopping.

"You knew," he said. "Down there. You knew the whole time who I was."

"I read your tape when you came down the ramp."

"Then why didn't you say something?"

Hollis looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached out, took the notebook out of the young man's hands - gently, the way you take something from a child - closed the cover, and snapped the slack rubber band back around it.

He looked out at the water instead of answering.

Behind them, at the top of the ramp, the passenger door of the patrol truck opened and Kelsey Rudd got out with her phone in her hand.