The Owner Line

The white key fob sat in Clem's cracked palm, and he stared at it without closing his fingers.

"Ro, what is this?"

"You remember the day in that picture?" I said. "The Saturday before Christmas. I'd just dried my first white convertible start to finish. You paid me eight dollars and took my picture with the shop camera."

"I remember."

"You stood there with your hands in your pockets and said you'd dried a thousand of those and never once driven one off the lane." I swallowed. "What did I tell you?"

Clem's lips moved before any sound came. "Pearl white," he said. "Top down."

"I'm late," I said. "Twenty-seven years late."

Behind me, Ivy made a small sound, and I heard her chair roll as she sat down hard. "The owner line," she whispered. "That's why you left it blank."

"Type his name, Ivy. Clement Haverty."

"No." Clem held the fob out across the desk to Ivy. "That goes back in your drawer, miss. I wash these. I don't drive them. What would I even..."

"Ivy's not taking it back, Clem." I closed his fingers over it with both my hands. "That's for the chili. The heater you left running. Every winter I've had since, in a warm house, because one morning you slid a van door open and asked if I'd eaten."

His free hand went to his back pocket, the way it must have gone ten thousand times, for the towel that always lived there. The pocket was empty.

"You sent two postcards," he said, rough. "Then nothing. I carried that picture in my pocket for twenty-five years so I'd know you were real."

"I know. I wanted to come back as somebody."

"You were always somebody."

Nobody on that floor was pretending not to listen anymore. Tiffany Pemberton was openly crying. Rex had his arm around her.

Clem turned toward the glass, toward my truck hanging off the wrecker in the sun. He straightened up as far as those shoulders still went.

"I'll take it," he said, "on one condition. Somebody puts that truck down. Right now."

Howard was already at the door. "Luis! Lower it. Gently."

The chain went slack. My pickup settled back onto her own four tires with a creak I felt all the way up my spine.

Brent had not moved from the desk. His face had gone the color of the tile.

"You let me do it," he said. "One phone call and I'd have handed you the keys myself. Why play poor?"

"I wasn't playing anything. That's my truck," I said. "I wanted to know what this lot does to the next man who pulls in driving one like her. Now I know. It hangs him by the axle."

Howard came back from the door and stood in front of me, and for the first time all afternoon he looked me full in the face.

"Mr. Treadwell," he said, "you tell me what you want done with him, and it's done."