The next name on Delphine's list takes two lines and a postscript. *Hollis Vance. Garage on Mill Lane, past the grange. You'll hear it before you see it!* Under that, in the second pen, the one that presses harder: *Don't mind the scowl. A writer hurt him once. Be gentle!!*
Jasper reads it on the grange steps with the morning cold climbing through the soles of his shoes. Frost silvers the lowest leaves of the chestnut. Across the oval, Biscuit works the edge of the grass with his nose down, reading the night's news off the ground.
*Be gentle.* Marlow would have handed him a briefing by now: four minutes of public record, a ranked list of the subject's grievances, a first question tuned to the pitch of the man's voice. Jasper would have walked into the garage holding Hollis Vance's whole history, and Hollis Vance would have felt understood inside a minute. Jasper has done it a hundred times. It always worked.
This morning he holds a street name and a postscript.
"Jasper Cole crosses the green," he says, low, to nobody, and hears himself. The habit again. Six years of dictating his own movements to an ear that wrote them down. He shuts his mouth and walks.
The white house with the blue door sits at the far end of the oval, the door propped open on its brick. Garrity sits alone on the bench with his sleeve shoved above the elbow and his bare forearm laid along the armrest, ink side up. The bandaged hand rests in his lap.
"Come witness," Garrity calls.
Jasper climbs the steps. The pen line makes a neat blue-black loop on the skin, and the red stripe inside it has faded to a pink that stops a finger's width short of the ink.
"It hasn't crossed."
"I checked it at three in the morning by the kitchen lamp." Garrity turns the arm toward the light. "Seven times. The doctor will say seven is too many."
"Is it?"
"It's the right number for a man who has to say it back." He pulls the sleeve down over the line with care. "Where are you headed with that face?"
"Hollis Vance's garage."
Garrity's eyebrows climb. He studies Jasper for the length of a slow breath, then looks away at the chestnut, and the bench creaks under him. "Take the cinder path behind the grange. Not the road. The road has a pothole that has eaten two wheelbarrows."
"Thanks."
"And leave anything that beeps in your pocket. Better yet, leave it in your room."
Jasper's hand has already gone to the inside of his jacket, where the recorder lies against his ribs, a flat black thing the size of a matchbook. He thumbs the switch until the light dies. Garrity nods as if Jasper had answered.
The cinder path runs behind the grange, past a row of beehives wrapped in tarpaper for the winter, then drops toward a creek. Cinders crunch under his shoes. The sounds arrive in layers: water over stones, a rooster with a grievance. From somewhere ahead comes the drone of a grinding wheel that bites and fades at intervals that mean nothing to him. Then a hammer. Three taps, a pause, one hard strike.
Biscuit overtakes him at a trot, inside-out ear flapping, and disappears around the bend with the air of a dog who has received a summons.
Where the path meets Mill Lane, a woman in a man's coat beats a rug over a porch rail. The rug is gray with dust. She stops mid-swing when he comes level and lets the beater hang.
"You'll be the one from the clip," she says.
"I'm the one who came about it."
She looks at his jacket, then at the notebook in his hand. "He's at the end of the lane. He won't want you."
"I've been told."
"Then you've been told the polite version." She goes back to the rug. The beater cracks. Dust leaps off it into the cold light, and she does not look up again.
Jasper rehearses as he walks. He drafts a compliment about the town's machinery and drops it for sounding like a brochure. A question about the grinding wheel, which he cannot name, goes the same way. He settles on silence. Silence is the oldest trick in the trade: sit still until the subject fills the gap with something true. Marlow used to cue him on the count. *Hold for six seconds. Now ask.* He counts to six in his head and has nobody to tell him when it ends.
The garage stands where the creek bends, a long barn of weathered boards under a tin roof patched in three shades of gray. The big sliding door is open the width of a man. Oil has stained the ground in front to a black skin that stretches twenty feet. A chicken lives under a rusted harrow and regards him from there. Behind the barn, a low shed with a tin chimney and one small window leans against the slope, and a sound comes out of it, thin and steady, a fly's whine held in a jar. It does not rise or fall. It does not stop.
Biscuit has beaten him here by a margin that suggests a shortcut. He lies across the threshold with his chin on his paws, facing in.
"You could have mentioned the shortcut," Jasper tells him.
Biscuit declines to comment.
Jasper stops at the edge of the oil and takes out the notebook. He holds it in plain view. Then he knocks on the doorframe, and the knock comes out smaller than he meant.
***
The inside of the garage is taller than the outside promised. Rafters carry chains and a hoist on a rail. Light drops from a skylight patched with a sheet of plain glass, and from a row of windows along the creek wall gone brown with years of spray. A woodstove ticks in the corner. The air tastes of cutting oil and coffee left on the stove past its time.
Along the right wall hangs a pegboard the length of a barn stall, and every tool on it hangs over a silhouette painted in white. A hammer over a hammer's ghost. A saw over a saw's. One outline near the end holds nothing: a big adjustable wrench, drawn in white, with no wrench inside it. Jasper looks at the empty outline a second longer than the rest.
A workbench runs down the middle of the floor. An engine from some small machine sits clamped in a vise at its near end, and beside it, on a folded rag, a carburetor lies in pieces laid out in rows. Each screw lies by its twin and each spring above its seat, and the tiny brass jets rest along the top edge in order of size.
The man at the bench does not look up. He sits on a steel stool with a jeweler's loupe pushed back on his forehead and a length of fine wire in his right hand. He is broad through the shoulders, with forearms streaked black to the elbow, and he wears a flannel shirt with coveralls over it, the legs rolled once at the boot. His jaw has a set to it, as though he keeps something behind his teeth and has done so for years. He feeds the wire through a hole too small to see and draws it out. He studies the tip, then feeds it through again.
"Mr. Vance?"
The wire keeps moving. "Closed."
"The door's open."
"For air."
Jasper takes a step in. The planks give under his shoe with a soft, oily click. "Delphine said I'd find you here."
"Delphine says a lot of things."
"I'm Jasper Cole."
"Everyone knows who you are." Hollis squints at the jet against the skylight and sets it on the rag at the end of its row. "You've been the weather for two days."
It is a better line than Jasper expected, and he nearly laughs. The man's face does not invite it. Hollis reaches for the next jet and begins again.
"I'd like twenty minutes of your time."
"Haven't got it."
"I can come back later."
"Haven't got it then."
Jasper lets the quiet fill. He counts, because he has to. Four. Five. Six. Hollis cleans a jet. The stove ticks. Out back, the radio hum goes on, and a second sound runs underneath it: the creek.
"I've never watched anyone do that by hand," he says. "Where I'm from, a repair unit scans the part and prints a new one in the time it takes to find a chair."
"Then you've never watched anyone clean a jet."
"That's what I'd like to see."
"You're seeing it."
"I'd like to ask about it."
"Ask the jet."
Jasper smiles at that, the professional smile, the one Marlow used to rate at ninety-two percent warmth, and it lands on a surface that offers nothing to grip. Hollis does not glance at it. He lays the wire down across the rag, and for one beat the room is Jasper's. Then the big hands pick up the next jet and the wire again.
"Mr. Vance, I'm writing about Fair Hollow. About the people who keep it running."
"I keep a few things running. The town runs itself."
"That's the kind of thing I'd like on the record."
"Then you have it." Hollis lowers the loupe over one eye and bends to the bench. "Take it. Go write it."
"It's one line."
"It's a good line."
"A line isn't a story."
"Not my trade."
Jasper shifts the notebook from one hand to the other. He had a second opening, a warm one about craft and the dignity of repair, and it dries up in his mouth. In every room he has entered for six years, a voice in his ear supplied the next question when the last one died. He stands in the middle of a barn floor with a notebook and no next question.
"I can work to your terms," he says. "Off the record, background only. Whatever you need."
"Terms."
Hollis says it flat, the way a man names a part he does not trust. The wire stops in the middle of the jet.
"She had terms," he says.
It is nothing. A pronoun. It goes by in half a second. Hollis's face stays flat. The hand with the wire goes still, and the stillness gives him away.
***
Jasper has heard that pronoun a thousand ways in a thousand rooms, and his body answers before his judgment does. He tilts his head and lowers his voice half a register. His eyes go soft.
"She," he says. "A woman came here."
Hollis says nothing. The wire goes through the jet and comes out.
"Delphine wrote that a writer hurt you once. She didn't say who."
"Delphine writes a good many notes."
"When was it?"
"Door's behind you."
"I'm not asking for the whole story. Just the outline. A year. The name of the outlet." The briskness creeps into his voice and he
cannot stop it. It is the voice that gets doors open. "Whoever she was, whatever she did, you've been carrying it a long time. Sometimes it helps to say it to someone who isn't from here."
"Does it."
"In my experience."
"What's your experience?"
"Six years of listening to people who thought nobody would." Jasper takes a step toward the bench. "I'm good at it. I don't make people sorry they spoke."
Hollis sets the wire down parallel to the row of jets and squares it to the edge of the rag with two fingers. Then he lifts the loupe from his eye and looks at Jasper for the first time.
The eyes are gray and level. They have no anger in them yet. They hold the look of a man deciding whether a part is worth the bench or the scrap pile.
"Who sent you?" Hollis says.
"Everline."
"Who sent you to me?"
"No one. Delphine gave me a list. You were on it."
"I'm on a list." Hollis nods twice. "Right."
"That isn't how I meant it."
"How'd you mean it?"
Jasper opens his mouth, and the reply he had ready, something about the town's story needing all its voices, comes out in a version that sounds like a pamphlet. He closes his mouth. He starts again, and the second attempt is worse.
"A town this small, with this much to lose, can't avoid being written about. It will happen. Somebody will come, and the clip has already told them where to look. I'd rather the story had you in it, in your words, than have someone fill in the shape of you from outside." He spreads one hand. "That's the argument for talking. Weather comes either way."
"Weather," Hollis says. "I said that."
"You did."
"I'd forgotten you were listening."
"Mr. Vance."
"You're good at it," Hollis says. "I'll grant you that. Where did you learn to do the voice?"
Heat climbs the back of Jasper's neck. Hollis has held up a mirror without looking into it himself, and Jasper dislikes what shows. "That's just my voice."
"It was a different one at the door."
"Everyone has more than one."
"I believe that." Hollis crosses his arms, and the coverall straps creak. "So which of them's going to write it?"
Jasper should stop. Every part of his training says the subject has closed. The correct move is a thank-you and a retreat, and a return in a week with a loaf from Bart's and empty hands. A better man would do it. The other thing in him rises instead, the clever one that cannot leave a locked door alone and built a career on knowing what people would say if given the chance.
"I can find out, you know." He says it lightly. "It's not hard. A writer, a town this size, a story eight or ten years old, probably twelve. Everything that gets published stays published. I could be back in my room tonight with the whole thing in front of me. I'd rather hear it from you."
The stove ticks. A drop of water falls from the roof edge outside and strikes a tin bucket. In the doorway, Biscuit lifts his head.
"Go and find it, then," Hollis says.
"I'm only saying."
"I heard what you're saying. You've got a place with a search in it. Go sit in it. See if it tells you what was in the room."
"That's not what I meant."
"You came in the way they come in." Hollis stands. The stool scrapes. He is taller than he looked on it, and he does not loom, which is worse. "A smile at the door and a sharp question after. Terms. A word about what helps. Then the line about how it'll get written whether I like it or not, so I may as well be in it." He wipes his palms on a rag. "I've heard that last one before. Almost word for word."
The stove ticks twice. Jasper's pulse beats in his ears with nothing under it to steady it. In the city, a signal would have gone off by now, a pressure on the eardrum, a soft tone that meant *redirect*. He listens for it out of habit. He gets the creek.
He should apologize. The words are right there. He turns instead, because his eyes need somewhere to rest. Through the open back door of the barn the yard runs to the low shed with the tin chimney, its small square window glowing amber where the sun has caught it. Shelves fill the glass from floor to roof, and on every shelf stands a wooden cabinet with a round dial at its face. A wall of faces. Hundreds of them. Under them runs that thin, steady sound.
"What's in the shed?" he says.
He says it before he decides to, the way he said the line about looking it up. He takes a step toward the back door, and a second. The planks shake. Hollis Vance crosses the floor faster than a man his size has any right to move and plants himself between Jasper and the doorway, one hand flat against the frame.
"Out," Hollis says.
"I only meant to ask."
"Out."
It is the quietest thing he has said all morning. Up close he smells of cutting oil and wool. Gray threads the stubble along his jaw, and a small white scar cuts through his left eyebrow where the loupe had hidden it. Tendons stand out in the hand on the frame. The other hand opens and closes once at his side.
Behind them, Biscuit rises. He crosses the floor with his nails ticking on the planks and sits down against Hollis's leg. He does not look at Jasper. He leans his whole weight on the man's knee, and from deep in his chest comes a single low whine, thin as a wire drawn through a jet, held for exactly as long as it takes Hollis to breathe in.
Hollis's hand on the frame loosens. He looks down at the dog. He does not touch him.
"Don't," he says to the dog, low, as if the dog had spoken.
Biscuit stays where he is.
Jasper steps back. Then back again, until the edge of the bench meets his hip. His fingers have tightened on the notebook without his permission. He wants to say he is sorry and the word will not leave his mouth in a shape he trusts. It would be one more line, and the man has had enough of those.
"I overstepped," he says.
"Yes."
"I shouldn't have said I'd look it up."
"No."
"I'll leave." He means it. He holds the notebook against his chest like a schoolboy and does not move toward the door. "I'm sorry I came in like that."
Hollis stands a while longer in the doorway with the dog against his leg. The hum from the shed fills the space between them. Jasper waits for the big man to point at the door and say it one more time.
"Sit," Hollis says.
"I'm leaving."
"Sit down, Cole. There's a crate."
There is a crate. It stands against the bench leg, an apple crate with a stenciled name on its side, and Jasper lowers himself onto it with his knees almost at his chest. Hollis goes to the sink in the corner and works the pump handle three times. Water spills into the basin. He scrubs his hands and forearms to the elbow with a bar of gray soap, and the black runs off him in threads, and under it his skin is younger than Jasper had thought.
He dries his hands on a towel that hangs from a nail and takes the stool again, palms flat on his thighs.
"Put the thing down," he says.
"The notebook?"
"The pen."
Jasper puts the pen on the bench. He lays the notebook beside it, closed.
"And the other one."
For a moment Jasper does not follow. Then he does. He reaches into his jacket and draws out the recorder and sets it on the bench by the pen. It sits in the oily light with its small dead eye. In six years he has never set one down in front of a subject and watched it from the subject's side of the bench.
"It was off," he says.
"They always are." Hollis looks at it and not at him. "She had one like it. Smaller."
"I'll leave it on the bench the whole time."
"You'll pick it up when you go. Not before." Hollis glances at him. "I'll tell you once. I won't tell it twice, and I won't tell it all."
***
Hollis does not begin at once. He picks up the wire from the rag and turns it over, then sets it down again. He studies the carburetor with no use for it, hunting for a first word the way a hand hunts for a switch in the dark.
"Eight years back," Hollis says. "Spring. Mud season. The road to the grange was a bog, and she walked it in good shoes."
Jasper keeps his hands on his knees.
"She had a coat the color of oatmeal. I remember the coat. Everybody remembered the coat. A town this size, a stranger in a coat like that, you notice." He rubs a thumb along a black seam in his palm. "She said she wanted to understand. That was the word. Understand. She said it to Delphine and Sylvie. She said it to me. Sylvie said it was a good word. I thought so too."
"What was she writing?"
"A piece, she said. About us. How a place gets to be what it is." Hollis's mouth flattens. "I liked how she said it."
"Which outlet?"
"No."
"All right."
"I'll tell you what she did, and I won't tell you who she was." Hollis looks up. "That's the offer."
Jasper nods. "That's fair."
"It isn't. It's what I've got." Hollis draws a breath through his nose. "She stayed three weeks. At Bart's she let him talk her ear off. In Sylvie's yard she pulled weeds nobody had asked her to pull. She learned the children's names. Cassius taught her a tune. She played it badly, and he laughed. She listened better than anyone I'd met."
"And you liked her."
"I did." He says it to the floor. "She came here on the ninth day. She stood where you're standing. She asked about the engine on the bench. I showed her. When I finished she asked a question I had waited my whole life for somebody to ask. Why I fix and don't replace."
Jasper opened with a cousin of that question a quarter hour ago. Hollis told him to ask the jet.
"I told her." Hollis flattens his hand on his thigh. "I don't talk much. You've noticed. I talked for two hours. I told her things I haven't said to the council. Some I haven't said to Doc. About my father's shop and the year it went under. About what a man does with his hands when the thing they were made for isn't wanted." He lifts his chin toward the back door. "And then she asked what was in the shed."
The hum fills the pause. It gives up nothing.
"And you told her."
"I took her out. I opened the door."
Hollis's eyes go to the window and stay there. "Four hundred and twelve radios. I've fixed every one. Old sets, hand-wired, from before anything in them could think. The first came out of my father's shop, a walnut cabinet with a cracked dial and a tube gone milky. He kept it on a shelf over the lathe and never once turned it on. After he died I carried it home under my coat and spent a winter finding out why it wouldn't speak. When it finally hissed, I sat on the kitchen floor and listened to it for an hour." He tips his head toward the wall. "The rest followed. Every one tuned to nothing. Between stations, the dead part of the dial, where there's only the hiss. I like the hiss. It's the sound of a room with no one in it telling you what to feel."
"Why?"
"Why do I like it?" For the first time something close to humor crosses his face, and goes. "You've been in a world where every room has somebody in it. Try the other."
"I can't remember a room like that."
"Then the hiss will be loud for a while."
The six seconds Jasper counted on the path come back to him, and the voice that never told him when to stop.
"She asked what they were tuned to," Hollis says. "I said nothing. It was the truth. I thought she'd understand. She stood in there with her little black machine for twenty minutes and I let her stand. I thought she was listening."
"She was recording."
"She was doing both." He says it without heat. "That's the part you'll never get across to somebody who hasn't been through it. She was listening. She wasn't lying. Every minute she sat in this town she meant it."
He picks up the wire. He turns it, and one end catches the light.
"What did she write?" Jasper says.
"No."
"I only want the gist."
"No." The quiet voice again, the one from the doorway. "You'd take it with you. You'd carry what she said I was into every room you walked into with me, and you'd read me through it. Whatever you decided about me, you'd have decided with her sentence in your head." He sets the wire parallel to the others. "You said you'd find it. Fine. You'll find it. I won't be the one to hand it to you."
"What's in it that you can't say?"
"What's in it is true." Hollis lets the wire go. "Not one thing she wrote was a lie. I checked, years ago, when I could stand to. A sentence, then another one, and every one of them true. She had only put them next to each other in a way that made a thing I never said. A man in a shed full of radios, listening to nothing. A lonely man, listening for someone who wouldn't come."
Jasper holds still. "And you weren't."
"I was listening to nothing." Hollis lifts his hand and lets it drop. "I like nothing. That's all it is. It's mine."
"What happened after it ran?"
"People came."
He says it to the carburetor. His thumb passes once across the black seam in his palm.
"Not many," Hollis says. "A few at first. Then a few more."
"How many is not many?"
"Forty, over the summer. Fifty." He measures the green in the air with a flat hand. "You can cross it in two minutes. They stayed all afternoon. A man from the city sat on my truck's fender to get the light on the creek. Left a dent the size of a plate. He took four pictures and went away happy." Hollis draws his breath in. "People arrived on the green with cameras. They stood and held them up, and they waited. For what, I don't know. For us to do the thing. For Cassius to play, for Bart to shout. And what I couldn't get over, what I still can't, is that we did it."
Jasper looks up.
"We did it," Hollis says. "Nobody told us to. Nobody asked. Bart shouted a little louder. Cassius played a tune he'd played ten thousand times and played it like a man hoping to be liked. Folks I'd known twenty years stopped me in the lane and asked if they were doing it right. Doing the town right. For the people holding the cameras." The flat voice cracks down the middle, only a hairline, and he gets it closed. "Took us most of a winter to stop. Took one council meeting to say it out loud. By then the thing had already been done."
"That's what she cost you."
"That's one." His eyes hold on Jasper. "I'm not telling the rest. It belongs to people who aren't in the room."
Jasper has held that posture a hundred times: arms raised, elbows tucked, the whole body bent around a lens. From behind the lens it feels like watching. He tries the view from the grass, a row of black glass eyes turned on a fiddler, and has to look at the floor.
He nods. His wrist aches to write it. He keeps his hands on his knees.
Outside, a wind comes up. It rattles the tin on the roof and stirs the chains hanging from the rafters until they knock together with a dull chime.
"They all say the same thing," Hollis says. "The ones who come. Understand. They want to understand us, they say. It's a good word. I've never found anything wrong with it." He turns the loupe over in his hand. "What I want to know is what it's for. Nobody tells you. They sit at your table and eat your bread, and they do understand, I'll give them that. Then a year goes by, and the understanding is sitting in a drawer in a building somewhere with a price on it and a job to do." He sets the loupe on the bench. "They find a use for us. That's what understanding turns into, in your trade. Use."
"That's not true of all of it."
"Not all of it."
"There are people who do this work right."
"There are." Hollis does not raise his voice. "I've counted them. It doesn't take long."
Jasper looks at the recorder on the bench, small and black beside the pen. The briefing assembles itself out of habit, the ranked list of rebuttals. *Not all journalists. Standards exist. Accountability exists.* Each carries a confidence percentage. He holds them up against the man on the stool, the loupe, the scar through the eyebrow, and none will leave his mouth.
"I'm not her," he says.
"You'd say that."
"That's not an answer."
"It isn't meant to be." Hollis gives a short breath through his nose that might be the ghost of a laugh. "She said it too. Not those words. Close. She said, 'Whatever happens, I want you to know I'll treat you well in it.'" He looks at his hands. "I believed her. That's what I can't leave alone. I believed her, and I was right to, and it made no difference."
Jasper has no reply. The sentence is familiar. He has said a version of it himself, in a car outside a house, to a woman whose husband had died that morning. He meant it. He wanted the story. At the time those two facts had not looked like two things.
Biscuit crosses the planks from the doorway and lies down across Jasper's shoes. The weight is warm. Neither man mentions it.
***
The hum goes on. A hen has come in through the open door and stalks the length of the pegboard, inspecting the white outlines of the tools, and neither man looks at her. Biscuit has not moved from Jasper's shoes. He lies there with his chin on his paws and his eyes shut, an animal at the end of a long shift.
Jasper rubs his palms down the knees of his trousers. They leave a damp print on the cloth. "What do you want me to do?"
"With what?"
"With all of it. With what you told me."
"Nothing." Hollis shrugs, a slow rise and fall of the heavy shoulders. "I didn't tell it to you for a purpose. If I wanted something done, I'd have said what."
"Then why tell me?"
"You asked."
"I asked in a way that earned the door."
"You did." Hollis nods. "You also asked in a way that told me you'd go and ask somebody else." He scratches the scar through his eyebrow with a knuckle. "I'd sooner you got it from me. Short, and with the edges on. Delphine would give it to you with a ribbon on top. Bart would give you six versions, and four of them would have dragons."
Jasper laughs. It escapes him, a single short sound, and he claps his mouth shut over the second. Hollis looks at him, and the corner of his own mouth shifts a quarter inch and holds.
"I didn't say it was funny," Hollis says.
"I haven't met the dragons."
"You will. They come after the second loaf." Hollis rolls his stiff neck. The vertebrae crack, one after another. "Don't bring the dragons to a story. They don't print well."
He pulls the carburetor rag toward him and goes back to the work as if the last quarter hour had been a part he had to set down to reach the part beneath it. The big hands lift a jet to the skylight and lay it in its place at the end of the row. They never hurry and never hesitate. A man who works like that has already lived the next ten steps.
"How do you remember the order?" Jasper says. The question is a real one. It comes out with no edge on it, and the difference sits odd in his mouth.
"The rag."
"The rag."
"Left to right is the order it came apart. Right to left is the order it goes back." Hollis taps the cloth with the end of the wire. "Top row's the small things. Bottom row's the big. Anything that springs, I set above its seat. Anything that's lost its twin, I stop and I look until I find the twin." He grunts. "A scan would keep the order for you. Then you'd never learn why the order matters."
"Why does it matter?"
"It's how the thing wants to be put back." He nudges a washer a quarter inch to straighten the row. "Takes years to hear it. Once you've heard it you don't need the rag, but you keep the rag. A man who's stopped needing the rag has stopped listening."
Jasper writes none of it down. He keeps it in the place where he used to keep things for Marlow to file.
He drags both hands down his face. Eight hours on a hard bed in a cold room, and he is tired anyway. The tiredness sits behind his eyes. Nobody has told him what he did wrong, and he knows exactly what it was.
"I pushed," he says.
"You did."
"I do that. It usually works."
"I know it does." Hollis picks up a jet and checks it against the light. "It worked on a good many people I'd have said it couldn't."
"I'm not saying that
to excuse it."
"I know what you're saying." He sets the jet on the rag. "You're telling me you saw yourself do it. That's worth something. I don't know how much."
The honest answer comes up through Jasper's chest with no polish on it. "I'd like to say that I won't do it again. I'm not sure that's true."
Hollis looks at him for a long moment. Something in the gray eyes shifts and settles, the way a loose part settles when you tighten the right bolt.
"That's the first thing you've said in this shop I'd put money on," he says.
Jasper looks down at the notebook on the bench. He wants to pick it up. He leaves it where it lies, and his hand stays open on his knee.
"The shed," he says.
"Nobody goes in the shed."
"I won't. I only want you to know that I understand it isn't a secret."
"It isn't." Hollis stands and shoves the stool back with his calf. "It's mine. There's a difference. I don't expect your trade has the word for it."
"It has a word. People don't use it."
"What's the word?"
"Private." The word weighs something in his mouth. He has never said it as if it did. "Where I'm from, we stopped using it around the time everybody's ear started listening back."
Hollis takes this in. He collects the recorder from the bench with two fingers, as he would lift a bug off a table, and holds it out. Jasper takes it. It lies against his palm, light and warm from the room, and he returns it to the inside pocket where it came from. The notebook goes into the other. The pen goes into the spiral.
"You didn't write it down," Hollis says.
"No."
"I watched your hands."
"You told me not to."
"I've told a good many people not to." Hollis lowers the rag. "Sylvie will ask what passed between us. She asks it the way she asks everything. Tell her the truth. A little said, and none of it written."
"I will."
"Dr. Voss showed me her jar," Jasper says.
It comes out of him with no plan. Hollis stops with the rag in his hand.
"Which jar?"
"The one on the sill. Where she keeps what children swallow. There's a button in it." Jasper nods at Hollis's flannel. "She said it came off your best shirt."
Hollis closes his eyes. When he opens them his jaw has gone slack, and the boy of eleven looks out through the man's face, grease on his cheeks, in trouble over a good shirt.
"She told you that," he says.
"It's in the jar."
"She keeps everything." He wads the rag and tosses it on the bench. "Dared me, my cousin did. Said it would pass. It took four days."
"She said nobody who put something in that jar was ever in trouble."
"She said that to me too." Hollis stands still. "I didn't believe her. I stood in her front room with my mother's hand on my neck, waiting to find out how bad it would be, and she gave me a biscuit." He lifts a shoulder. "She was the first adult in my life who said a thing was fine and then went on acting like it was."
"What did you do?"
"Ate the biscuit. What else?"
The hen has reached the end of the pegboard. She considers the empty outline of the wrench, steps into the white shape with one orange foot, and withdraws it.
"Whose wrench was that?" Jasper asks.
"Mine."
"Where is it?"
"Lent it to Hettie Pruitt." Hollis jerks his chin toward the door. "She's had it three weeks. She said she'd have it back to me by Friday, and I said Friday of what, and she said, 'That's the spirit.'" He snorts. "I'm too fond of that woman to ask for it. So I keep the outline."
"So you'll know it's out."
"So I'll know it's coming back." He wipes his forearm on his coverall. "A thing that's out and a thing that's lost are different. The outline tells me which."
"Does she know you keep it?"
"She passes it every Sunday. Says it looks lonesome." The corner of his mouth shifts. "I say that's the idea."
Jasper turns the idea over. It is smaller than he expected, and heavier. Pia's tooth in the jar. The second line nobody read. At nineteen he lived in a flat where every object carried a tag that told him what to do with it, and nothing there had an outline for what he lost.
He stands. His knees ache from the crate. He slides his shoes out from under the dog, who groans and resettles on the planks and does not follow him to the door.
"I'd like to come back," he says.
Hollis has returned to the bench, standing now, the loupe down over one eye and the wire in his hand. "Door's open."
"For air."
"For air."
"Is that a yes?"
Hollis feeds the wire through the jet. It slides, and he draws it out and holds the part up to the skylight with one eye shut. The creek runs over its stones. Out in the shed, four hundred and twelve radios go on hissing at nothing.
"We'll see," he says.