Chapter 10

Marsha read it twice, at the folding table, with the microphone off. Then she turned the mic on and said, "We'll table the vote until Thursday. The books get looked at by the state. I'm not signing anything I can't explain."

Two-thirds of the room left without speaking to me. That was fine. Nine people shook my hand. Faye was one of them, and she stood there a long time and didn't say anything, and I let her.

At nine that night I drove the flatbed out Coon Hollow Road with Ren in the passenger seat and Eli between us on the bench, and I stopped where the road shoulder widens before the second cattle guard, and I killed the engine and put the dome light on.

The foundation's still there. Chimney, three courses of block, a slab with the bolt holes where the sill was. Somebody's been dumping brush on the far corner.

"That's our old place," Eli said. He had his crayon map in his lap, the same folded intake form. He'd drawn that house from his father's stories a hundred times without ever seeing it.

"Yes," Ren said.

"Dad." He looked back and forth between us. "Is Aunt Willa's arm the same fire?"

Ren put his hands on his knees.

I listened to a man tell his son the truth in his own words, which is the only way truth is worth anything. He said: I was three and you were not born yet and my sister was six and a company made a mistake and burned our house. He said: my mother could not keep us both and she kept her. He said: I was adopted by people who loved me and they knew where I came from. He said: nobody told us about each other, and that was wrong, and that's what lying does, it makes you pay for thirty years.

Eli listened with his whole body, the way kids do when they can tell it matters.

"You got traded," he said. "Like a baseball card."

"Not like that."

"You did, though," Eli said. "You got traded for her arm." He thought about it. "That's not fair."

"No."

"Are you mad?"

Ren looked at the slab. "Yes."

"At who?"

"At everybody," Ren said. "Including me."

Eli considered that and then leaned into me and asked, "Will you teach me to run the winch on your wrecker?"

The wrecker's still got water in the frame. It's going to be months. I said yes anyway. I said yes before I finished thinking, and I've never once taken it back.

My mother died three weeks later, on a Tuesday at 6:40 in the morning, with the oxygen going and the television off, and I was in the chair beside her. I had signed the paperwork that let it happen and I signed it again when the nurse brought the folder, and I sat with her until the aide came in.

She never apologized. I want to be honest about that, because I know how the story sounds and I'm not going to give her something she didn't take. She never said she was sorry. The last thing she said to me, the night before, was, "Is he there?"

I said, "He's in the parking lot."

She said, "Don't let him in."

I let him in. He stood at the foot of the bed for two minutes with his hat in his hands and didn't say anything either, and then we both walked out into the lot and stood in the rain and Faye brought us coffee.

Marsha Pike and the committee did the books. It came out ugly, in the Register, over four months - the maintenance log, the removed lab page, the word counsel on the back of a fire file. The company paid. Not much, and late, and without admitting a thing, the way companies do. There's a new tank farm pad above the flood line now and a fence that runs on the actual property line. The low bridge got rebuilt with state money and it's got my mother's name on the plaque, which I didn't ask for and can't do anything about.

Dalton Ottaway still nods at me at the Sunoco. That's the whole town's version of justice.

Tonight I pulled the wrecker out of the shop for the first time since August. Frame dried, brakes redone, boom chained down. The sky was that flat gray it gets here before the snow, and Ren came by with Eli after his shift, and we sat in the cab with the dome light on and the heater going because the heater's the only thing on that truck that never quit.

Eli wanted the winch lesson. I let him sit on my lap and hold the lever with both hands - nothing on the hook, no load, just the drum turning in the dark - and he made a serious face like a man running a crane.

When he got down, Ren rolled his left sleeve up and put his forearm next to mine on the steering wheel.

Two scars in the yellow light. Same starburst. Same night. Same house, thirty years back, and two living people out in front of it.

My right hand was on the gearshift.

My left hand was on the boy's shoulder.

That's where we are. That's what it cost. And it's still here.