The motorcycle was still running, and for a while, that was the only thing I let myself think about.<\/p>\n
I watched Reed work near the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
Odom stood beside the workbench, his phone resting where he had set it down.<\/p>\n
Brix remained close enough that I could see the canvas bag in his hand.<\/p>\n
Nothing about the room looked different from a few minutes earlier.<\/p>\n
The tools were where they had been.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle was where we had been working on it.<\/p>\n
The front windows still showed the same ordinary view outside.<\/p>\n
But the conversation had changed the way I saw all of it.<\/p>\n
Before Brix spoke, getting the Shovelhead running had felt like the job in front of us.<\/p>\n
Now, every time I looked at the motorcycle, I remembered the question he had repeated.<\/p>\n
What had Brix seen?<\/p>\n
That was what the man wanted to know.<\/p>\n
Not simply whether Brix had been inside the shop.<\/p>\n
Not simply whether Reed had spoken to him.<\/p>\n
He had asked about the motorcycle itself.<\/p>\n
I could repeat those details easily.<\/p>\n
Understanding them was another matter.<\/p>\n
Reed adjusted his position beside the bike.<\/p>\n
I watched him without meaning to.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I was trying to find an answer in somebody else's expression.<\/p>\n
It wasn't there.<\/p>\n
"Everything all right?" Odom asked.<\/p>\n
Reed glanced toward him.<\/p>\n
"Far as I can tell."<\/p>\n
It was a simple answer.<\/p>\n
I appreciated that he didn't try to make it sound stronger than it was.<\/p>\n
Odom looked at the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
Then he looked at Brix.<\/p>\n
Nobody spoke for a few seconds.<\/p>\n
I had begun to understand how much space a few unanswered questions could occupy.<\/p>\n
They didn't need to be complicated questions.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the simplest ones were the hardest to leave alone.<\/p>\n
Why had the diner man asked about Reed?<\/p>\n
Why had he wanted to know what Brix had seen?<\/p>\n
And what had the argument about Saturday actually meant?<\/p>\n
We had no answers.<\/p>\n
We had Brix's account of what he had heard and nothing more.<\/p>\n
I reminded myself of that because my mind kept trying to fill in the spaces.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to turn a few sentences into a story that might have nothing to do with what had happened.<\/p>\n
Brix had told us what he knew.<\/p>\n
That did not mean he knew why it had happened.<\/p>\n
He had been clear about that.<\/p>\n
"I don't know," he had said.<\/p>\n
I could still hear the uncertainty in his voice.<\/p>\n
There had been no confident explanation hidden behind those words.<\/p>\n
He had not claimed to understand the men or their argument.<\/p>\n
He had only told us what he remembered.<\/p>\n
That mattered.<\/p>\n
I looked at the canvas bag again.<\/p>\n
Brix held it close to himself, his hand tightened around the fabric.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he had expected us to ask more questions.<\/p>\n
Maybe he had expected us to dismiss what he said.<\/p>\n
I couldn't know that either.<\/p>\n
What I did know was that he had chosen to tell us.<\/p>\n
I didn't want our response to make him regret it.<\/p>\n
"Can I ask you something?" I said.<\/p>\n
Brix looked at me.<\/p>\n
"Sure."<\/p>\n
"When you heard them talking, did you understand what they meant by something being found?"<\/p>\n
He considered the question.<\/p>\n
Then he shook his head.<\/p>\n
"No. I just heard them say it."<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
There was no reason to press him for an answer he had already told us he didn't have.<\/p>\n
"All right," I said.<\/p>\n
He looked toward Reed.<\/p>\n
"That's all I know."<\/p>\n
"I understand."<\/p>\n
I meant it.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I felt embarrassed by how much I wanted him to give us more.<\/p>\n
A name would have helped.<\/p>\n
A clearer description of the argument might have helped.<\/p>\n
Even one extra detail could have given us something definite to examine.<\/p>\n
But wanting information didn't make it available.<\/p>\n
Brix had told us what he remembered.<\/p>\n
The rest belonged to questions we couldn't answer yet.<\/p>\n
Odom picked up his phone, looked at it, and put it back down.<\/p>\n
He didn't make a call.<\/p>\n
He didn't offer a theory.<\/p>\n
He simply returned his attention to the workbench.<\/p>\n
That quiet decision helped me more than I expected.<\/p>\n
It reminded me that we could acknowledge the uncertainty without allowing it to take over everything.<\/p>\n
Reed continued working.<\/p>\n
I stayed where I was, trying to settle my thoughts.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle had been running before Brix spoke.<\/p>\n
It was still the motorcycle we had been working on afterward.<\/p>\n
Nothing about the machine itself had explained the diner man's interest.<\/p>\n
We didn't know what Brix had supposedly seen.<\/p>\n
We didn't even know whether the man believed Brix had seen anything important.<\/p>\n
Those were two different questions, and I had been treating them as if they were one.<\/p>\n
I tried to separate them in my mind.<\/p>\n
The man had asked.<\/p>\n
Brix had answered what he could.<\/p>\n
The argument had happened behind the kitchen.<\/p>\n
Something had to be found before Saturday, according to the words Brix remembered.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, we had nothing firm.<\/p>\n
I looked at Reed again.<\/p>\n
He hadn't offered a theory, and I was beginning to understand why.<\/p>\n
A theory could feel useful simply because it gave a person something to hold.<\/p>\n
That didn't make it true.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to mistake relief for evidence.<\/p>\n
The sound of the running motorcycle filled the space between us.<\/p>\n
For a little while, none of us tried to talk over it.<\/p>\n
I found myself grateful for that.<\/p>\n
There were moments when silence felt like avoidance.<\/p>\n
This wasn't necessarily one of them.<\/p>\n
We had said what we knew.<\/p>\n
We had admitted what we didn't.<\/p>\n
Repeating the same questions would not make the answers appear.<\/p>\n
I shifted my attention back to the workbench.<\/p>\n
The phone was still there.<\/p>\n
The canvas bag was still in Brix's hand.<\/p>\n
Reed was still beside the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
Those ordinary details gave me something concrete to look at while my thoughts settled.<\/p>\n
I could work with what was in front of me.<\/p>\n
I could listen if Brix remembered something else.<\/p>\n
I could pay attention to what Reed and Odom said without assuming they knew more than they did.<\/p>\n
And I could stop asking the same question in different ways, hoping one version would produce a different answer.<\/p>\n
That was not a solution.<\/p>\n
It was simply the most honest place to begin.<\/p>\n
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 … <\/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-40054","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\/40054","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=40054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40074,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40054\/revisions\/40074"}],"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=40054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}