By then, I had memorized the questions.<\/p>\n
Not because I wanted to.<\/p>\n
Because they had been repeated enough times in my head to become familiar.<\/p>\n
Had Brix been inside the shop?<\/p>\n
Had Reed spoken to him?<\/p>\n
What had Brix seen on the motorcycle?<\/p>\n
I could hear the words without remembering the exact sound of the diner man's voice.<\/p>\n
That was the strange part.<\/p>\n
The conversation had happened somewhere else, but it had taken up space in our shop.<\/p>\n
We hadn't witnessed it.<\/p>\n
We hadn't heard the man ourselves.<\/p>\n
Yet we were all reacting to it.<\/p>\n
I began to understand why people sometimes became obsessed with incomplete information.<\/p>\n
The mind doesn't like an unfinished story.<\/p>\n
It wants a beginning, a middle, and an end.<\/p>\n
When one part is missing, it keeps trying to supply it.<\/p>\n
I was doing that.<\/p>\n
I would consider one explanation, then reject it because another possibility seemed just as likely.<\/p>\n
Then I would start again.<\/p>\n
It was exhausting.<\/p>\n
Reed seemed less interested in guessing.<\/p>\n
He focused on what could be checked.<\/p>\n
If there was a practical task to finish, he finished it.<\/p>\n
If there was something about the motorcycle that needed attention, he attended to it.<\/p>\n
He did not pretend that the mechanical work could explain the diner man's behavior.<\/p>\n
I tried to follow his example.<\/p>\n
Odom was more visibly restless.<\/p>\n
He moved between the workbench and the motorcycle, sometimes stopping to look at one or the other as if he expected a new detail to appear.<\/p>\n
I knew he wanted to help.<\/p>\n
I also knew that there wasn't much we could do with what we had.<\/p>\n
At one point, he asked Reed the same question I had been thinking about.<\/p>\n
"Do you remember anyone mentioning the motorcycle before this?"<\/p>\n
Reed considered it.<\/p>\n
"People talk. I can't tell you that every conversation meant something."<\/p>\n
"That's fair."<\/p>\n
"If I remember something specific, I'll say so."<\/p>\n
Odom nodded.<\/p>\n
He seemed to accept the answer, though it didn't satisfy him.<\/p>\n
It didn't satisfy me either.<\/p>\n
But we weren't entitled to a better answer just because we wanted one.<\/p>\n
I looked at the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
The machine had been our main concern for so long that I had almost forgotten how much time we'd spent worrying about whether we could get it running.<\/p>\n
Every delay had felt important.<\/p>\n
Every small success had brought relief.<\/p>\n
Now the engine's condition seemed like the simplest part of our situation.<\/p>\n
We could hear whether it ran.<\/p>\n
We could observe how it behaved.<\/p>\n
We could work toward a result and see whether we had reached it.<\/p>\n
The diner man's intentions were different.<\/p>\n
There was no way to test them directly.<\/p>\n
We could only consider what Brix had said and avoid pretending that it proved more than it did.<\/p>\n
That should have made things easier.<\/p>\n
Instead, it made me impatient.<\/p>\n
I wanted the missing information.<\/p>\n
I wanted to know why the man had been so interested in Reed.<\/p>\n
I wanted to know what he thought Brix might have seen.<\/p>\n
Most of all, I wanted to know what the argument behind the diner had to do with Saturday.<\/p>\n
The questions remained unanswered.<\/p>\n
I tried to imagine how Brix had experienced the conversation.<\/p>\n
He had been near the back of the diner.<\/p>\n
He had heard two men arguing.<\/p>\n
He had not been part of their discussion.<\/p>\n
He might have caught only a few words.<\/p>\n
Then the man had asked him about the shop and the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
Later, the man had hit him.<\/p>\n
I couldn't know exactly how Brix had connected those moments in his mind.<\/p>\n
I only knew that they had stayed with him.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had spent hours wondering whether he had done something wrong.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had worried that telling us would bring more trouble.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had simply needed somebody to listen.<\/p>\n
I was careful not to decide which of those things was true.<\/p>\n
But I couldn't ignore the fact that he had come forward despite his uncertainty.<\/p>\n
That took something.<\/p>\n
I thought about how easy it would have been for him to keep quiet.<\/p>\n
He could have told himself that the questions were none of his business.<\/p>\n
He could have decided that the argument was something he didn't need to remember.<\/p>\n
He could have left us to finish the motorcycle without ever mentioning what he had heard.<\/p>\n
Instead, he had walked into the shop and told us.<\/p>\n
I was grateful for that.<\/p>\n
I was also aware that gratitude did not solve the problem.<\/p>\n
Reed came over to the workbench and rested one hand against it.<\/p>\n
"Whatever the man meant, we don't know yet."<\/p>\n
Odom looked at him.<\/p>\n
"I know."<\/p>\n
"We shouldn't act like we do."<\/p>\n
"I know that too."<\/p>\n
Reed gave him a small nod.<\/p>\n
I could tell they were both frustrated.<\/p>\n
Neither wanted to turn uncertainty into an accusation.<\/p>\n
Neither wanted to ignore something that might matter.<\/p>\n
Those were reasonable concerns.<\/p>\n
They were also difficult to hold together.<\/p>\n
For a while, nobody spoke.<\/p>\n
The shop had its own familiar sounds.<\/p>\n
A tool being moved.<\/p>\n
Footsteps crossing the floor.<\/p>\n
The quiet movement of people going about their work.<\/p>\n
I found comfort in those ordinary details.<\/p>\n
They reminded me that the world had not suddenly changed just because we had heard a troubling account.<\/p>\n
We still had the same responsibilities.<\/p>\n
We still had the same work to finish.<\/p>\n
And we still had time before Saturday, even if it no longer felt like enough.<\/p>\n
I glanced at the clock.<\/p>\n
Odom noticed.<\/p>\n
"You're counting the hours too?"<\/p>\n
I gave him a tired smile.<\/p>\n
"Apparently."<\/p>\n
He looked toward the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
"I'd rather be counting the things we have left to do."<\/p>\n
"Me too."<\/p>\n
For a moment, we were talking about the repair again.<\/p>\n
That felt good.<\/p>\n
It was a familiar problem.<\/p>\n
We could make a list of what remained and work through it.<\/p>\n
We could see what needed attention.<\/p>\n
We could finish the job.<\/p>\n
Then the other questions returned.<\/p>\n
Not because we had invited them.<\/p>\n
Because we still had no answers.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether the diner man would continue asking about the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he believed Brix had told us something.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether the other man from the argument knew anything about our shop.<\/p>\n
Each question led to another.<\/p>\n
I stopped myself before I could go further.<\/p>\n
We had no evidence that the diner man had followed Brix.<\/p>\n
We had no evidence that the other man knew where we worked.<\/p>\n
We had no evidence that anything had been hidden on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
Those were possibilities, not facts.<\/p>\n
I needed to keep remembering that.<\/p>\n
Reed returned to the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
He stood beside it for a moment, then turned his attention to the work that remained.<\/p>\n
There was something reassuring about his decision.<\/p>\n
He wasn't dismissing the warning.<\/p>\n
He was refusing to let it consume every part of the day.<\/p>\n
I followed his lead.<\/p>\n
We worked.<\/p>\n
We checked what needed checking.<\/p>\n
We made sure we were not neglecting the motorcycle because we were distracted by questions that had no immediate answers.<\/p>\n
It wasn't a solution.<\/p>\n
It was simply the next sensible thing to do.<\/p>\n
And sometimes, when you are stuck in a situation you cannot yet understand, the next sensible thing is all you have.<\/p>\n
By then, I had memorized the questions. Not because I wanted to. Because they had been repeated enough times in my head to become familiar. Had Brix been inside the … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40068,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40048\/revisions\/40068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}