The cold finds the tin before he reaches the chestnut. It works in through the seam of the lid and settles in two of his fingers, and he shifts the box into the crook of his arm the way a man carries a loaf home from Bart's. Frost has furred the lid. Under it, on bare metal, the recorder lies in the dark and does the one thing Everline built it to do.
Biscuit walks at his knee with his head low.
Half the lanterns along the water have gone out. The guitar has given up its four chords. Near the third stone a man sits zipped into a sleeping bag to the armpits and holds his phone up toward the grange, where the red point burns under the eave. He has turned the screen so the eave fills it. On the glass a smaller grange looks down at a smaller green, and across that green a smaller man walks with a tin under his arm.
Jasper keeps his eyes on the frost.
At Delphine's cord he ducks, as Wren ducked it, and straightens with the shop in front of him. The window downstairs is dark. Upstairs his own lamp burns low behind the glass, where he left it at noon. Above the bed in that room hang eight sheets of wrapping paper, taped at the corners, and the eighth carries four short lines in his own hand.
His boots head for the stairs without asking him.
Biscuit stops.
The dog stands in the lane with one forepaw raised and his inside-out ear tipped toward the porch. His tail swings once, low. Then he trots ahead into the shadow under the porch roof and climbs the first step.
Someone sits on it.
A thermos stands on the boards by a boot. The coveralls have gone black in the dark. Breath smokes out over a pair of knees and hangs there. Biscuit turns a half circle and leans the whole of his weight into the man's side, and a hand comes down onto the dog's back and stays.
"Took her a while."
Jasper stops at the foot of the steps.
"Sylvie said to let her finish." Hollis keeps his seat. "I sat in the ring and watched the clock. Then I came and sat here and watched her door. It shut at a quarter past nine." He lifts the thermos, weighs it, and sets it down empty. "She had a good deal to say."
"She did."
"Did you argue?"
"No."
"Good." Hollis tips his chin at the tin under Jasper's arm. "Bart's."
"Milo told her a tin stops a radio."
"The boy's half right. The seam's not soldered." He holds out a hand, palm up, broad and black along the creases. "Give it here."
Jasper hands it down. The tin leaves a cold square on the inside of his arm where it rode, and his arm goes on carrying the shape of it for a moment after it has gone.
Hollis tilts his head back and studies the upstairs window, the low lamp, and the corner of a taped sheet showing past the curtain's edge. He has never climbed those stairs. He reads the window anyway, the way he reads a part.
"Your wall," he says.
"Yes."
"Wren told me about it. In the ring." He lowers his eyes. "Said you'd written us all up there in pen. Said it was the first thing she'd seen of yours that looked like a person did it."
Jasper has no answer to that. Hollis does not wait for one. He weighs the tin, turns it so the faded label faces the lane, and tucks it under his own arm without lifting the lid. Then he gets up in stages, one knee and then the other, a man who has stood at a bench since before light.
"Walk."
***
They take the cinder path behind the grange.
Hollis goes first and carries no light. His boots find the cinders and miss the roots, and Jasper follows the crunch of them and the pale shape of the tin riding at the man's hip. Biscuit runs between them. The beehives stand in their tarpaper coats with frost along the lids. A single bee walks the landing board of the end hive, slow with cold, and goes back in.
Behind them the grange door opens. Voices spill out, then a spoon taps wood, and the door closes on them.
"Is the ring still sitting?"
"They'll sit till midnight." Hollis keeps his head forward. "Bart brought soup. Hettie's on her third account of the goat."
"Did they decide anything?"
"They decided to keep sitting."
Where the path bends past the last hive, two figures stand in the dark beside a tent pitched against the grange's rear wall. A screen glows between them. It lifts as the men come level, and its light swings across Hollis's coveralls and finds his face.
"Oh my God." a woman's whisper. "Rick. It's him."
"Sir? Mr. Warden?" The man takes a step onto the cinders. "Sorry. Mr. Vance. We wanted you to know we're on your side. A hundred percent. People shouldn't get to walk into your shed."
Hollis does not slow. He passes close enough for the man to touch his sleeve, and the man does not touch it. The screen turns to follow him.
"Thank you for everything you do," the woman calls after him.
Jasper keeps walking. Ten paces on, the screen finds him too. A breath goes in behind the glow, then a second whisper with his own name in it. Nobody calls anything after him. The cinders crunch under his boots, louder than he wants them.
The path drops toward the creek. Water runs loud in the dark, high from the week's rain, and the cold comes up off it and finds Jasper's collar. On his first walk down this path he rehearsed. He drafted openings and threw them out. A voice had taught him to count to six, and he counted. Tonight he has no opening to draft. The only sentence in his head is the one he owes, and its first word stays out of reach.
Ahead of him, Hollis's back fills the path, broad and dark, the tin a pale square against the coveralls. The man has not turned once to check that Jasper follows. He has no need to check. A man who listens to engines for a living reads a step by its sound, and Jasper's step has gone heavy and uneven on the cinders, a man carrying something with no handle.
At the bend the garage comes up out of the dark, long and low under its patched tin, the big door shut. A lantern hangs on a nail by the man's door. Hollis lifts the glass, strikes a match on the frame, and the wick takes. Yellow light falls across the black skin of oil in front of the door.
Hollis's truck stands nosed against the barn wall. The lantern catches the front fender, and on its frosted paint lies the print of a pair of seat pockets, two rounded ovals melted into the white where somebody sat to frame the creek. Below the prints, in the old metal, the plate-sized dent from eight years ago holds its shadow. Hollis does not glance at either. He has had all afternoon to look.
Something sits in the middle of the oil.
A box the size of a hymnal, wrapped in brown paper and tied with red ribbon. A card hangs off the bow on a loop of string. Hollis steps around it as he would step around a dog asleep in a doorway.
Jasper stops.
"Read it if you want." Hollis sets the tin on the step. "Everybody else has."
Jasper crouches. The paper has gone soft with frost. The card carries a purple felt pen: FOR THE WARDEN'S COLLECTION!!! WE HOPE IT HUMS FOR YOU. LOVE, THE KOWALSKIS (OHIO). The paper has torn at one corner, and through the tear shows white plastic and a grille with a small glass eye at its center.
"It talks." Hollis works the latch. "I opened that much. You turn it on, and a woman in it asks what you'd like to hear."
"They meant it kindly."
"I know what they meant. They drove seven hours to mean it."
Jasper stands. The box sits on the oil at his feet with its ribbon trailing. He leaves it where it lies.
Behind the barn, the shed leans against the slope, its one small window dark. The sound comes out of it as it did three weeks ago, thin and level, a fly's whine held in a jar. It does not rise. It does not stop. Four hundred and twelve radios go on hissing at nothing, and nobody has asked them what they'd like to hear.
Hollis picks up the tin and holds the door. "In."
***
The stove has burned down to a red eye behind its grate. Hollis opens it, feeds it two splits of oak, and leaves the door open a crack so the light runs out along the floor. He hangs the lantern from a hook over the bench. The rafters come up into the light with their chains and their hoist. Along the wall the pegboard comes up after them, every tool over its painted ghost.
The adjustable wrench hangs in its outline near the end of the row.
Jasper's eyes stay on it.
"Hettie." Hollis sets the tin on the bench. "Came at four. Hung it herself. Didn't say a word to me, and I didn't say one to her."
"She saw it."
"Everybody saw it. Took a film to get my wrench back." His mouth moves at one corner and goes flat again. He hooks the apple crate out from under the bench with his boot and shoves it across the planks. "Sit."
Jasper sits. His knees come up nearly to his chest, the same as before. Biscuit crosses to the stove, turns twice, and drops onto the boards with his back to the heat and his eyes on the two men.
Hollis does not take the stool. He stands at the bench with both palms flat on the wood, one on either side of the tin, and studies the lid.
The carburetor has gone. In its place lies a small brass pump body opened down its seam, its parts set out on the rag in rows. A leather cup and a spring. A check ball the size of a pea, sitting in a bottle cap so it cannot roll. Left to right, the order it came apart.
"You've seen it." Hollis keeps his eyes on the lid.
"The film?"
"Mine."
"Yes."
"Where?"
"This morning. In a van. Janie played it for me twice." Jasper's mouth has dried. "She wanted me to see the music."
"I saw it at half past two." Hollis lifts one hand from the bench and puts it down again in the same place. "A boy from the tents. Fourteen, fifteen. He came down Mill Lane with his phone out in front of him like a cat with a bird. He stood at the edge of the oil. He said, Mister, is this you? He was proud of finding me."
The oak cracks in the stove with a small crack.
"It's eleven seconds long," Hollis says to the tin. "I watched it
four times on that boy's phone, so I could say it back. You want to hear what's in it?"
"You don't have to."
"I asked if you wanted to."
Jasper's hands have closed on his knees. He opens them. "Yes."
"A picture of my door. This door." Hollis does not point. "From up on the ridge, through a long glass, you can tell. The light's flat, and it shakes a hair. A man's come up the oil toward me in a red cap. One of the Friday people. He wanted the shed. I put my hand on the frame, and he went back to his car, and that was the whole of it. Thirty seconds. Nobody raised a voice." He breathes in through his nose. "In the film they've slowed my hand down and laid music under it. Low notes. A cello, maybe. I don't know instruments."
"And the word."
"And the word." Hollis lifts his eyes. "On the picture from Friday they've laid my voice. One word. I said it in here. On that spot." His chin dips toward the boards between the bench and the back door. "Three weeks ago, to you. With your little black box on my bench by the pen."
Jasper's eyes go to the spot. The planks there have worn pale in a shallow trough, where a man has stood at a back door for twenty years.
"Out."
Hollis says it the way he said it then, quiet, and the quiet goes into Jasper like a nail.
"Then it says THE WARDEN, white on black. Then it's Bart in his window with flour on his face, laughing at something, and the music goes cheerful." Hollis takes his hands off the bench. "Eleven seconds. I counted. The boy asked could he get a picture with me. I said no. He said, that's so you. He was pleased with me for saying it."
Jasper waits for more. Hollis has more. It shows in the hands, which have found a rag and fold it in half, and in half again, until it will not fold.
"He went back up the lane and told the tents. By three there were twenty on the edge of my oil." Hollis sets the folded rag square to the bench edge. "Nobody stepped on it. They'd seen the film. They knew where the line was. They stood at the edge like it was a rope at a museum and held their phones up and waited."
"For what?"
"For the Warden." He says it without inflection. "A woman went round the side of the barn while I had my head in the pump. When I came out she had her phone flat to the shed window with her hand cupped round it, the way you'd look into an oven. I hung a feed sack over the glass. She said sorry. She said it twice. She meant it both times."
The roar in the stove drops a note as the first split burns through.
"Here's what I came to tell you, Cole. Some of it." Hollis looks at his own hands. "About four o'clock I went to the door to see if they'd gone. Before I went, I wiped my hands. I stood up straighter at the bench. I didn't know I'd done it till I was standing in the door with clean hands and my chin up, giving them the man from the film." The hands turn over. "Eight years ago I watched this whole town do that. Bart louder. Cassius playing to be liked. I told you about it on that crate like it was something that happened to other people. And this afternoon I did the Warden for twenty strangers and a sack over a window."
"You stopped."
"I went back in and got grease on my hands again on purpose." The corner of his mouth tugs and settles. "That's how far it got. A man rubbing grease on himself so he'd feel like himself."
***
Jasper has carried this since the van. He carried it on the creek bank with Alan, and on the stone by the trough with the recorder warm under his palm, and into Wren's shop while she laid four black prints along her bench. Carrying it has bought him nothing. He sits on the crate with his hands open on his knees, and his whole body wants to say a thing in Alan's lilt, something smooth that begins with *context.* He holds his jaw shut against it.
"I'm sorry."
"I know you are." Hollis pulls the stool to him and sits at last. The stool takes his weight with a creak. "That's not what I walked you down here for."
"What did you walk me down here for?"
Hollis reaches past the tin to a drawer under the bench and pulls it open. Inside lie the jeweler's loupe and a coil of fine wire. He takes nothing out. He stares into the drawer as though the answer has rolled to the back of it.
"Eight years ago." His thumb rubs the drawer pull. "Spring. I told you this."
"Mud season."
"She walked the road in good shoes." He shuts the drawer. "I told you the coat. Oatmeal. I told you she stayed three weeks and pulled weeds in Sylvie's yard. I told you she sat where you're sitting." He touches the crate with the toe of his boot. "Her knees came up the same. She laughed about it."
"I remember."
"Do you remember what you said to me? At the end, before I gave you the box back?"
It comes up whole, with the smell of cutting oil and the hen stepping into the white outline of the wrench.
"I said I'm not her."
"You said I'm not her." Hollis dips his chin once. "And I said you'd say that."
"You said it wasn't meant to be an answer."
"It wasn't." He sets his elbows on his knees and lets his hands hang between them. Black seams cross both palms. "She sent a card. Did I tell you that? The Christmas after it ran. A picture of snow on a fence. No town I knew. Inside she wrote she thought of us often and hoped we were well. In ink, in her own hand. I could tell by the *w* in *well.* It went over the line." He turns one hand over and studies the palm. "I kept it four years in that drawer. Then one day I put it in the stove."
"Why four years?"
"I kept waiting for it to say something else."
The stove has drawn the oak into a steady roar. Light shakes along the floor between them.
"I had you pegged the day you stood in my door." Hollis rubs the scar through his eyebrow with the side of a knuckle. "Before you opened your mouth. The shoes told me. Then you opened your mouth and did the voice, and the voice told me the rest. Wren said give him time, and Delphine said be fair." A breath through his nose. "Sylvie said nothing. That's what Sylvie says when she wants you to work it out yourself."
The roar steadies.
"And then you sat on that crate and put your pen down, and you told me you didn't know whether you'd do it again. You said you weren't sure." His hands stay hanging. "That's the line I believed. It came out of you ugly. Nobody polishes a thing that ugly."
Jasper swallows. The swallow sticks halfway down.
"So I thought, all right. A man who knows that much about himself might watch for it." Hollis lifts his eyes. They are gray and level, and they hold no heat. "You didn't watch for it."
"No."
"You did it with Wren standing at your elbow telling you."
"Yes."
"Then you did it again on the ridge. With your mouth. You gave that man a word." Hollis keeps his voice where it is. In three weeks he has never once raised it in Jasper's hearing. "And you did it every day you walked around this town with that box against your ribs, and nobody stopped you, because we'd all decided you'd stopped."
"You hadn't decided."
"I had." Hollis says it to the floor. "That's what I've sat with since half past two. Me. I'd decided."
***
The oak settles in the grate. Out past the wall the hiss goes on, faint under the stove's roar, and for a long minute it is the only voice in the garage.
Jasper listens to it the way Hollis taught him three weeks ago, without asking it for anything. It gives him nothing. He sits in the nothing and lets it be loud.
When he opens his mouth, the voice that comes out has no polish on it.
"You were right about me."
Hollis does not move.
"The first day. In the door. Everything you saw when you looked at my shoes." Jasper's eyes want the floor. He keeps them on the gray ones. "I came in the way they come in. You said that. A smile at the door and a sharp question after. You had me in one sentence. I told myself you didn't. For three weeks I told myself I'd changed. I'd stand on the green and believe it, and in my pocket the whole time..." He stops. "You were right not to trust me. You were right to keep your hand on that frame."
"I know I was right."
"I wanted you to hear me say it."
"I heard you." Hollis straightens on the stool. "Doesn't help."
"I didn't think it would."
"You thought it might a little."
Jasper holds still. Then he dips his head, because it's true. Hollis watches him do it, and something in the gray eyes gives a quarter turn and stops.
"Being right." Hollis turns the word over the way he turns a jet against the skylight. "Garrity came by after the boy. Sat on the fender. Said, well, Hollis, you called it. He meant it as a kindness. I've been right about one thing in my life that I'd give my truck to be wrong about, and it's that." He picks a fleck of oak bark off his knee and drops it on the floor. "I'd hoped. That's the part I can't forgive. I'm fifty-three years old, and I sat in that ring this morning and hoped. I wanted to be wrong worse than Wren did."
"Wren said you'd take your turn."
"This is my turn."
"It's shorter than hers."
"I'm not her." The corner of Hollis's mouth lifts and falls. "And there's less to say. I said most of it three weeks ago. I'll not say it twice."
*I'll tell you once. I won't tell it twice.* He said that on this stool, with the recorder lying dark on the bench by the pen. The sentence comes back to Jasper in Hollis's flat voice, word for word, and he has never once replayed it. He has never needed to. It sits on a server, waiting for anybody who asks.
Jasper's eyes go to the tin.
Hollis catches them going.
***
"There's something else."
Hollis waits. He has always been better at it than Jasper.
"I told Wren four things tonight. She made me give them corners." Jasper's voice thins, and he lets it. "There was a fifth. I held it back from her. It belongs to you."
The stove door creaks on its hinge as the heat moves it. Biscuit lifts his head off the boards.
"The box." Jasper nods
at the tin. "The switch on the side turns off a lamp. That's all it does. The recorder runs whether the lamp is on or off. It's in my contract. Section nine. I signed it in an elevator and never read it. Janie told me today at the van, the way you'd tell a man the time."
Hollis's hands have gone still on his knees.
The morning comes back to him in pieces. Frost on the chestnut. The hen. His own hand reaching into his jacket, and the recorder coming out into the oily light with its small dead eye, and the clean feeling of setting it down on the subject's side of the bench for the first time in six years. He was proud of that. He carried the pride up Mill Lane afterward like a loaf.
"When I set it on your bench, it was running."
"I told you to put it down."
"I put it down. It ran."
"I told you you'd pick it up when you went."
"I picked it up. It had run the whole time." Jasper says the rest in order, the way Wren asked for it, one corner and then the next. "Every night it sends what it has to a server in the city. It doesn't need me to press anything. In the van Janie showed me the index, so I'd see how much good material I'd brought in. There's a file with your name on it. VANCE, GARAGE. Two hours and six minutes."
Hollis says nothing.
"The word in the film came out of that file. That's where they found your voice." Jasper's hands shake. He lays them flat against his thighs until they stop. "The rest of it is there too. Your father's shop. The radio on the shelf over the lathe. The kitchen floor, and the hour you sat on it." He swallows. "What she cost you. The part you said belonged to people who weren't in the room. The boy who swallowed the button. Two hours and six minutes, in your voice, on a server that belongs to Alan Croft."
The stove roars. Out past the wall the hiss goes on.
Hollis stands.
He does it without hurry. He crosses the planks to the back door and opens it, and the cold comes in and swings the lantern on its hook. Beyond the door the yard runs dark to the shed. The small window has no light in it. The hiss comes in louder now through the open door, thin and level.
He stands in the doorway with his back to the room and one hand on the frame.
Jasper stays on the crate. The hand lies flat on the wood, black in the creases. It is the hand from the film, the hand from a ridge on Friday through a long glass. Somewhere under a city a server sits cool and humming in its own dark and holds two hours of this man's voice as a row of numbers. Anybody could ask it for a sentence. It would hand the sentence over.
"Once." Hollis speaks to the yard.
Jasper waits.
"I told it once. In my life. To a woman in a coat, and then to you." His voice has dropped low enough that the hiss nearly covers it. "I said I'd not tell it twice."
"I know."
"Now it'll tell itself." He does not turn. "Any hour of the day. To anybody that asks it. In my voice."
"Yes."
"It'll tell it better than me, likely. Your Janie's machine. It'll find the good parts and lay them next to each other." The hand on the frame does not move. "She only had twenty minutes. In the shed. You got two hours."
The sentence settles in Jasper's chest and stays there. He has no reply that belongs in the room, and so he gives none.
"What else is on the index?"
The question comes over Hollis's shoulder, low and flat. Jasper does not want to answer it. He answers it.
"A file for each of us. Most of them short. OSEI, BOOK. ABARA, PRESS. There's one called OKONKWO-HART, WINDOW." He wets his lips. "And FITCH, WOODS."
Hollis's hand tightens on the frame. The knuckles stand up under the grease.
"The boy."
"Forty minutes. The first night I followed him out."
"Does he know?"
"Wren's gone to find him."
"Wren." Hollis breathes out through his nose, and the breath smokes in the cold of the doorway. "She'll do it right. She'll tell him plain and sit with him after." A pause. "Better her than you."
"Yes."
"Better her than me."
Biscuit gets up from the stove. He crosses the floor with his nails ticking, goes to the back door, and sits against Hollis's leg, as he did three weeks ago, and leans. He makes no sound this time. He leans, and Hollis's hand comes off the frame and down to the dog's head, and rests between the ears, the inside-out one and the straight one.
They stand like that while the cold comes in.
Then Hollis shuts the door.
***
He comes back to the bench, and on his way he passes the pegboard. His eyes go to the wrench in its outline and rest there.
Jasper follows them. Three weeks ago the white shape hung empty, and Hollis told him what the shape was for.
"It's out," Jasper says. "The file. It's out, the way the wrench was out."
"No." Hollis keeps his eyes on the pegboard. "Out is a thing with somebody on the other end of it who means to bring it back. Hettie had my wrench. Hettie passes my door every Sunday." He turns his head. "Who's on the other end of yours?"
Jasper has no name to give him. Alan, a server, a legal department, a woman in Dayton who types four words. None of them pass the door on Sundays.
"Then it's lost," Hollis says. "Say it right."
"It's lost."
"I'll not paint an outline for it."
He sits. He pulls the tin toward him across the wood and looks at Bart's capitals and the frost going to water on the lid.
"Wren put it in here."
"Yes."
"Before she let you in."
"Yes."
Hollis grunts. He works the lid off with his thumbs. On the bare metal the recorder lies black and small, the size of a matchbook. No light shows on it. He lifts it out between thumb and forefinger, the way he lifted it three weeks ago, as a man lifts a bug off a table, and sets it on the bench.
He sets it exactly where it lay before. By the drawer, two inches from the edge. Jasper's pen lay beside it then. No pen lies there now.
"Is it running?"
"It's always running."
"Then let it hear this." Hollis opens the drawer and takes out a screwdriver no longer than his finger, with a blade like a needle. He fits the loupe into his eye. "I'm a mechanic. I'm opening a thing on my bench."
He turns the recorder over. Four screws, each smaller than a grain of rice, hold the back. He lifts them out one at a time and lays them on the rag beside the pump parts, left to right, in the order they come. The back plate comes off. He lays it below the screws. Inside, a green board sits on a flat silver cell. He studies the board through the loupe for a long time without touching it, the way he studied the jets.
"Nice work." He says it to the board. "Somebody's hands were on this once."
"A machine built it."
"A machine built the board. Somebody's hands drew the machine." He slides the needle blade under the edge of the cell and lifts. The cell comes free with a small click. He holds it up to the lantern, a silver coin with a stripe of blue on one face, and lays it on the rag at the end of the row.
"Now it's off."
Four screws, a back plate, a board, a silver coin. A minute ago the thing was a voice.
"They always are." It comes out of Jasper cracked.
Hollis's eye lifts from the loupe. He holds Jasper's gaze for a long breath. Then he takes the loupe out and sets it down.
"Right to left is the order it goes back. You know that."
"I know."
"Whether it goes back's not your call." He rests his palm on the rag beside the parts. "It stays on my bench."
"All right."
"Don't say all right to me like I asked you something."
Jasper shuts his mouth on the second *all right.* Wren said the same an hour ago, in words close to these. Two people in one night have handed that phrase back to him, and he can count, now, the years he has spent offering it to people who never asked for it.
His eyes go past the bench to the back door. Behind it, in the dark, the first radio sits on its shelf, the walnut cabinet with the cracked dial. He knows where the man found it and how long it took to make it speak. He knows the kitchen floor. A question rises in him about the tube gone milky, what it was, how a man learns to bring one back. It is a good question. It would get a good answer.
He leaves it where it is.
***
Hollis gets up and goes to the stove. He lifts the kettle off its back corner, shakes it, finds water, and sets it over the open door where the heat comes out. He takes two tin cups off a nail. He does all of it with his back to Jasper. His hands want work that has nothing to do with the man on the crate, and they find it.
The kettle ticks as it warms.
"When's your train?" He speaks to the stove.
"I don't have one."
"There's a bus through Calder at seven. Walk out by five, you'll make it." Hollis spoons black tea out of a jar into both cups by feel. "That's what she did. Left on a Tuesday. I was at the pump. She waved from the bus window with her whole arm, like a girl going to camp." He sets the spoon down. "Bart gave her a loaf for the road, wrapped in a cloth. She cried a little on Delphine's step. Delphine wrote her into the book with two lines under the name." He stirs nothing in an empty jar with the spoon handle. "Sylvie walked her to the stop. I don't know what they said. Sylvie never told it. Two months later it ran."
"And the cloth?"
Hollis looks up.
"Bart's cloth. Did it come back?"
The question has no edge on it. Hollis hears that. His eyes rest on Jasper a moment before he answers.
"No," he says. "He asks after it still. Once a year. He says it was his mother's."
"You think I'll leave."
"I think you've already left. The rest is shoes."
Jasper looks down at his feet. The boots have gone brown to the laces with three weeks of Mill Lane. Under the bed at Delphine's, beneath the wall of paper, the good shoes sit side by side where he pushed them in his second week, still polished for a city sidewalk. He has not touched them since. He has not thrown them out, either.
The kettle sings a thin note and quiets before it can rise. Hollis
pours. Steam lifts off both cups in the lantern light. He brings one to the crate and holds it out, and Jasper takes it, and the heat goes into his hands and up both wrists, and he holds on. The tea is black and bitter and stewed past use. It tastes of the tin. He drinks it to the bottom of the first swallow and keeps it in his mouth a moment before it goes down.
Hollis carries his own back to the stool.
"Or you'll stay three weeks and write a letter." He blows across his cup. "A good one. You'll mean every word. We'll pass it round the ring, and Delphine will put it in her book."
Jasper looks down into the tea. Leaves have come loose from the spoon and turn in the dark water at the bottom of the cup.
The old engine, the one that built a career, wakes and catches. It always catches. It wants a plan, and it lays one out, piece after piece, in the order he could do them.
"I could go to the city. Tonight, or first thing. Stand in Alan's office until he deletes the file." He sets the cup on his knee. "I know where the servers sit. I know the man who runs legal. If I threaten to go public about section nine, about the units they bought before I ever got on the train..."
Hollis drinks his tea.
"I could write it. The whole thing. What they did with your word and where they found it. There are outlets that would run it. Smaller ones. They'd love it, a man from inside." The cup tips on his knee. He rights it. "I could have it out by Thursday. Before Alan's Friday..."
His own pitch has climbed at the commas. The lift belongs to a man in a green jacket with a tag still on the cuff.
Hollis turns his cup a quarter turn on his knee. His face gives nothing.
"I could buy it back. Every file." The figures come easy, the way they always came, with Marlow tallying in his ear. "My contract has a clause for that too, probably. Nine or ten. I never read those either. I could find out what they'd want for two hours of you, and pay it, and bring you the drive in a tin, and you could put it in the stove with her card."
The words hang. He hears how they sound in this room, with the parts on the rag and the man on the stool. Two hours of you. A price on it and a job to do. Hollis said that on this stool too.
"I could stand in front of every camera on the green, so they'd film me instead. I could find the Kowalskis. I could carry every gift on every doorstep back to the tents myself and..."
He stops.
The stove ticks. Hollis has not said a word. He sits on his stool with the tin cup in both hands and watches Jasper across the steam with the patience of a man waiting on a part that has not yet told him what is wrong with it.
Jasper sets his cup down on the planks by the crate.
Every plan in his mouth begins with *I.* Each one is a door he walks through first. The word Wren pulled out of his sentence an hour ago comes back to him, the small word at the end of it, the one that rose out of him unasked. *Mine.* He has done it again inside a minute. He sat in this man's garage, with this man's voice lying in pieces on the rag, and laid out four ways to fix Hollis Vance. Not one of them began with a question to Hollis.
"Jasper Cole," he says, low, "sits in a garage and..."
"Don't."
Hollis does not lift his voice.
"Not in here. Not that one." He sets his cup on the bench by the parts. "That's the one they built the man out of."
Jasper closes his mouth.
The hiss comes through the wall. He lets it be loud. He lets it fill his ears to the brim and sits in it and hands it nothing. Biscuit gets up from the back door and comes and lies across his boots. The weight is warm. Neither man mentions it.
When he speaks again, his voice comes out small and plain.
"What can I do?"
Hollis looks at him.
The look goes on. It goes on long enough for the oak in the stove to break and settle, and for Jasper to count to six and keep going and stop counting, because nobody will tell him when it ends. The gray eyes do not soften. They hold on him the way they held on him the first morning, deciding whether a part goes back on the bench or out to the scrap pile.
Then Hollis leans forward on the stool, elbows on his knees, and his voice comes out quieter than *out.*
"For once," he says, "don't decide for us."
He sits back. His finger squares the silver cell to the end of the row. Out past the wall, four hundred and twelve radios go on hissing at nothing, and nobody tells them what to feel.