PART 17 – I Kept My Eyes on the Workbench, Reminding Myself That Brix Had Given Us Facts, Not Answers

I stayed beside the workbench and tried to leave the questions where they belonged.

They had not disappeared.

I had simply stopped expecting them to answer themselves.

Reed was still working near the Shovelhead, and Odom remained close enough to follow what he was doing.

Brix stood nearby with his canvas bag.

The four of us were in the same room, surrounded by the same tools, listening to the same engine.

Yet none of us seemed able to return completely to the morning we had been having before Brix spoke.

I couldn't blame him for that.

He had told us something that mattered to him.

We had listened, and now we had to decide how to carry that information without pretending we understood it.

I looked at the phone resting on the workbench.

Odom had put it there earlier, and it had stayed there through most of our conversation.

I wondered whether I had been watching it because I expected him to call somebody.

Then I realized I had no reason to expect that.

He hadn't said he was going to make a call.

He hadn't suggested that a phone call would explain anything.

I had supplied that possibility myself.

I looked away.

It was becoming a habit, this search for meaning in things that had no clear meaning yet.

I didn't like how quickly it had taken hold of me.

"How's it going?" I asked Reed.

He glanced up.

"All right."

I waited, thinking he might say more.

He didn't.

I understood why.

There was no need to turn an ordinary question about the work into another discussion about the diner man.

I nodded and let him continue.

The Shovelhead had been running when Brix first began speaking.

That fact kept returning to me because the motorcycle had been the center of the conversation before I understood why Brix was worried.

Now the machine seemed to occupy two different places in my mind.

There was the motorcycle we had been working on.

Then there was the motorcycle the diner man had asked about.

They were the same machine, of course.

But I had started treating them as if the second one belonged to some hidden situation that we had not yet discovered.

That might have been true.

It might not have been.

I had to stop making the distinction do more work than the facts allowed.

Brix had heard questions about the motorcycle.

He had not told us that he had found something on it.

He had not told us that he knew what the diner man wanted.

He had only said that the man wanted to know what he had seen.

Those words were troubling enough.

I didn't need to change them.

Odom moved slightly beside the workbench.

His phone remained where it was.

I watched him for a moment, then made myself look back at Reed.

I had been waiting for somebody else to take charge of the uncertainty.

Maybe I wanted Reed to announce that he understood the situation.

Maybe I wanted Odom to suggest a practical next step.

Maybe I wanted Brix to remember one more detail.

None of those things was something I could demand.

Reed could work on the motorcycle.

Odom could listen.

Brix could tell us what he remembered.

Beyond that, we each had to live with what we didn't know.

I found that harder than I expected.

I liked problems that could be examined from different angles until something became clear.

This one had too many empty spaces.

Every time I tried to fill one, I had to admit that I was guessing.

So I stopped.

Not perfectly.

My thoughts still went back to the argument behind the diner.

I still wondered what the men had meant when they talked about something being found before Saturday.

I still wondered why the diner man had asked whether Brix had been inside the shop before.

But I no longer treated each question as if it required an answer from someone standing in front of me.

Sometimes a question remained a question.

That did not make it unimportant.

It only meant we had to be patient with it.

"You're quiet," Odom said.

I looked at him.

"Trying to think less."

He gave me a brief look that suggested he understood more than I had explained.

"Probably not a bad idea."

I almost laughed.

It wasn't because the situation was funny.

It was because the advice was so simple that I should have followed it earlier.

I looked toward Brix.

He had not added anything to his account.

I was glad nobody was asking him to.

He had already done what we needed him to do by telling us what happened as he remembered it.

I didn't want to make him feel that the usefulness of his warning depended on whether he could solve the mystery behind it.

He couldn't.

Neither could we.

The engine continued to run.

Reed kept his attention on the work.

Odom stayed near the bench.

I remained beside them, listening without trying to turn every sound into a message.

For a while, I managed to think about the work without immediately returning to the diner.

Then Saturday came back into my mind.

Forty-nine hours had been the amount of time left when Brix first spoke.

We had already spent some of it discussing what he had told us.

The deadline in the men's argument and the memorial ride remained connected in my thoughts, even though I couldn't prove they were connected in any other way.

I knew that coincidence alone did not establish a plan.

I knew that the mention of a day did not tell us what would happen on it.

Still, I couldn't make myself forget it.

I didn't think I needed to.

Remembering something was different from claiming to understand it.

That distinction became my way of keeping the situation in perspective.

I could remember every word Brix had given us.

I could pay attention if he offered another detail.

I could keep the motorcycle in front of me and the questions in the back of my mind.

What I could not do was turn the information into a conclusion simply because waiting felt uncomfortable.

I looked at the canvas bag in Brix's hand.

Then at Odom's phone.

Then at the Shovelhead.

They were ordinary details in an ordinary room.

The conversation had made them feel different, but I didn't have to let that feeling decide what they meant.

I took a breath and returned my attention to Reed.

For the moment, that was enough.

Click here to continue reading: PART 18: Odom and I Had No Better Explanation Than Before, but We Finally Stopped Acting as Though We Needed One Immediately