The motorcycle was still running, and for a while, that was the only thing I let myself think about.
I watched Reed work near the Shovelhead.
Odom stood beside the workbench, his phone resting where he had set it down.
Brix remained close enough that I could see the canvas bag in his hand.
Nothing about the room looked different from a few minutes earlier.
The tools were where they had been.
The motorcycle was where we had been working on it.
The front windows still showed the same ordinary view outside.
But the conversation had changed the way I saw all of it.
Before Brix spoke, getting the Shovelhead running had felt like the job in front of us.
Now, every time I looked at the motorcycle, I remembered the question he had repeated.
What had Brix seen?
That was what the man wanted to know.
Not simply whether Brix had been inside the shop.
Not simply whether Reed had spoken to him.
He had asked about the motorcycle itself.
I could repeat those details easily.
Understanding them was another matter.
Reed adjusted his position beside the bike.
I watched him without meaning to.
He seemed focused on the work, but I knew I was doing the same thing I had been doing since Brix told us about the argument behind the diner.
I was trying to find an answer in somebody else's expression.
It wasn't there.
"Everything all right?" Odom asked.
Reed glanced toward him.
"Far as I can tell."
It was a simple answer.
I appreciated that he didn't try to make it sound stronger than it was.
Odom looked at the motorcycle.
Then he looked at Brix.
Nobody spoke for a few seconds.
I had begun to understand how much space a few unanswered questions could occupy.
They didn't need to be complicated questions.
Sometimes the simplest ones were the hardest to leave alone.
Why had the diner man asked about Reed?
Why had he wanted to know what Brix had seen?
And what had the argument about Saturday actually meant?
We had no answers.
We had Brix's account of what he had heard and nothing more.
I reminded myself of that because my mind kept trying to fill in the spaces.
I didn't want to turn a few sentences into a story that might have nothing to do with what had happened.
Brix had told us what he knew.
That did not mean he knew why it had happened.
He had been clear about that.
"I don't know," he had said.
I could still hear the uncertainty in his voice.
There had been no confident explanation hidden behind those words.
He had not claimed to understand the men or their argument.
He had only told us what he remembered.
That mattered.
I looked at the canvas bag again.
Brix held it close to himself, his hand tightened around the fabric.
I wondered whether he had expected us to ask more questions.
Maybe he had expected us to dismiss what he said.
I couldn't know that either.
What I did know was that he had chosen to tell us.
I didn't want our response to make him regret it.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
Brix looked at me.
"Sure."
"When you heard them talking, did you understand what they meant by something being found?"
He considered the question.
Then he shook his head.
"No. I just heard them say it."
I nodded.
There was no reason to press him for an answer he had already told us he didn't have.
"All right," I said.
He looked toward Reed.
"That's all I know."
"I understand."
I meant it.
For a moment, I felt embarrassed by how much I wanted him to give us more.
A name would have helped.
A clearer description of the argument might have helped.
Even one extra detail could have given us something definite to examine.
But wanting information didn't make it available.
Brix had told us what he remembered.
The rest belonged to questions we couldn't answer yet.
Odom picked up his phone, looked at it, and put it back down.
He didn't make a call.
He didn't offer a theory.
He simply returned his attention to the workbench.
That quiet decision helped me more than I expected.
It reminded me that we could acknowledge the uncertainty without allowing it to take over everything.
Reed continued working.
I stayed where I was, trying to settle my thoughts.
The motorcycle had been running before Brix spoke.
It was still the motorcycle we had been working on afterward.
Nothing about the machine itself had explained the diner man's interest.
We didn't know what Brix had supposedly seen.
We didn't even know whether the man believed Brix had seen anything important.
Those were two different questions, and I had been treating them as if they were one.
I tried to separate them in my mind.
The man had asked.
Brix had answered what he could.
The argument had happened behind the kitchen.
Something had to be found before Saturday, according to the words Brix remembered.
Beyond that, we had nothing firm.
I looked at Reed again.
He hadn't offered a theory, and I was beginning to understand why.
A theory could feel useful simply because it gave a person something to hold.
That didn't make it true.
I didn't want to mistake relief for evidence.
The sound of the running motorcycle filled the space between us.
For a little while, none of us tried to talk over it.
I found myself grateful for that.
There were moments when silence felt like avoidance.
This wasn't necessarily one of them.
We had said what we knew.
We had admitted what we didn't.
Repeating the same questions would not make the answers appear.
I shifted my attention back to the workbench.
The phone was still there.
The canvas bag was still in Brix's hand.
Reed was still beside the Shovelhead.
Those ordinary details gave me something concrete to look at while my thoughts settled.
I could work with what was in front of me.
I could listen if Brix remembered something else.
I could pay attention to what Reed and Odom said without assuming they knew more than they did.
And I could stop asking the same question in different ways, hoping one version would produce a different answer.
That was not a solution.
It was simply the most honest place to begin.
Click here to continue reading: PART 14: Odom Left His Phone on the Workbench, and I Realized We Could Not Make an Answer Appear by Asking for One
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 13 of 20
