Odom glanced down at his phone again.
He didn't pick it up this time.
His attention moved from the screen to the motorcycle, then to Reed.
I knew the look on his face because I had been wearing something similar myself.
He wanted a reason.
Not necessarily a complete explanation.
Just something that would connect the diner man's questions to the motorcycle and make the whole thing easier to understand.
I wanted that too.
The problem was that wanting a reason did not mean we had one.
"There's no point pretending we know what he meant," Odom said.
Reed nodded.
"No."
The exchange was brief.
Neither man sounded satisfied.
Neither sounded surprised, either.
I had the feeling we were all reaching the same conclusion separately and then discovering that it was not much of a conclusion at all.
Brix had heard an argument.
The men had mentioned something being found before Saturday.
The diner man had asked about the shop, Reed, and the Shovelhead.
Those details belonged together in the conversation because Brix had heard and remembered them.
We did not know whether they belonged together in the way we feared.
That difference mattered more than I wanted it to.
I had already caught myself thinking of the motorcycle as the center of the problem.
Maybe it was.
Maybe the man had some reason to ask about it.
But the questions alone could not establish that.
I looked at the Shovelhead and forced myself to see the machine rather than everything I had started imagining around it.
It was a motorcycle we had been working to get running.
That was something I knew.
The diner man's interest was something Brix had reported.
What connected the two remained unknown.
I didn't need to pretend otherwise.
"Do you think he knew Brix was going to tell us?" I asked.
As soon as I said it, I wished I had phrased it differently.
The question assumed a kind of knowledge we had not established.
Odom looked at me.
"I don't know."
Reed didn't answer immediately.
Then he said, "We don't know what he expected Brix to do."
That was fair.
We didn't know whether the diner man expected Brix to keep quiet.
We didn't know whether he cared who Brix spoke to.
We didn't know why he had asked those questions in the first place.
I nodded.
"You're right."
There was no reason to defend a guess simply because I had been the one to say it.
Brix looked down at his canvas bag.
I wondered whether our questions were making him feel responsible for solving something that had never been his to explain.
He had already told us that he didn't know what the men meant.
I didn't want to keep circling back to the same point until he felt he had to invent an answer to satisfy us.
"You've told us what you heard," I said to him.
He looked up.
"That's all I have."
"Then that's all we have to work with."
He gave a small nod.
I couldn't tell whether the words reassured him.
I hoped they did.
The motorcycle continued running, and Reed remained close to it.
I could see how easily the work might become an excuse to avoid the harder question.
As long as we had something to adjust or examine, we could keep our hands occupied.
But I also knew that stopping the work would not answer anything.
We could stand around discussing the diner man for the rest of the morning and still end up with the same handful of facts.
The memorial ride was approaching.
Saturday had been mentioned in the argument Brix overheard.
The coincidence was difficult to ignore, but coincidence was not proof.
I repeated that to myself.
I did not know whether it helped.
Odom finally moved his phone farther across the workbench, clearing space in front of him.
The small movement caught my attention because I had been watching the phone as if it might suddenly become important.
It was just a phone.
Odom had put it down.
That was all.
I realized I was doing the same thing with every object in the room, giving ordinary things a significance they had not earned.
The canvas bag became a sign of Brix's uncertainty.
The phone became a sign of a call nobody had made.
The motorcycle became the answer to a question we couldn't define.
None of those interpretations made the objects any different from what they were.
I felt foolish for a moment.
Then I reminded myself that uncertainty had a way of making people search for patterns.
It didn't mean every pattern was real.
"Let's stay with what we know," Reed said.
Odom nodded.
"That's probably best."
I looked at Brix.
He didn't add anything.
There was no new detail to offer.
I could have asked him to repeat the conversation behind the kitchen, but he had already told us what he remembered.
Making him repeat it would not make his memory more complete.
It would only make us hear the same words again.
I let the question go.
For the first time since he had spoken, I stopped trying to turn his account into an explanation.
I didn't stop caring about it.
I didn't decide the diner man's questions were harmless.
I simply accepted that we could not yet say what they meant.
That was a smaller step than I wanted.
It was also an honest one.
Reed kept his attention on the Shovelhead.
Odom remained by the workbench.
Brix stayed with us, holding his bag.
I stood there with them, no wiser about the diner man's intentions than I had been a few minutes earlier.
But I understood one thing more clearly.
If we were going to take Brix seriously, we had to take the limits of what he knew seriously too.
We couldn't use his warning as permission to invent the rest.
We had to leave the unknown parts unknown.
Click here to continue reading: PART 15: Reed Kept His Attention on the Shovelhead, and I Tried to Understand Why That Was the Only Certain Thing We Had Left
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 14 of 20
