Odom glanced down at his phone again.<\/p>\n
He didn't pick it up this time.<\/p>\n
His attention moved from the screen to the motorcycle, then to Reed.<\/p>\n
I knew the look on his face because I had been wearing something similar myself.<\/p>\n
He wanted a reason.<\/p>\n
Not necessarily a complete explanation.<\/p>\n
Just something that would connect the diner man's questions to the motorcycle and make the whole thing easier to understand.<\/p>\n
I wanted that too.<\/p>\n
The problem was that wanting a reason did not mean we had one.<\/p>\n
"There's no point pretending we know what he meant," Odom said.<\/p>\n
Reed nodded.<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
The exchange was brief.<\/p>\n
Neither man sounded satisfied.<\/p>\n
Neither sounded surprised, either.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Brix had heard an argument.<\/p>\n
The men had mentioned something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
The diner man had asked about the shop, Reed, and the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
Those details belonged together in the conversation because Brix had heard and remembered them.<\/p>\n
We did not know whether they belonged together in the way we feared.<\/p>\n
That difference mattered more than I wanted it to.<\/p>\n
I had already caught myself thinking of the motorcycle as the center of the problem.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was.<\/p>\n
Maybe the man had some reason to ask about it.<\/p>\n
But the questions alone could not establish that.<\/p>\n
I looked at the Shovelhead and forced myself to see the machine rather than everything I had started imagining around it.<\/p>\n
It was a motorcycle we had been working to get running.<\/p>\n
That was something I knew.<\/p>\n
The diner man's interest was something Brix had reported.<\/p>\n
What connected the two remained unknown.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n
"Do you think he knew Brix was going to tell us?" I asked.<\/p>\n
As soon as I said it, I wished I had phrased it differently.<\/p>\n
The question assumed a kind of knowledge we had not established.<\/p>\n
Odom looked at me.<\/p>\n
"I don't know."<\/p>\n
Reed didn't answer immediately.<\/p>\n
Then he said, "We don't know what he expected Brix to do."<\/p>\n
That was fair.<\/p>\n
We didn't know whether the diner man expected Brix to keep quiet.<\/p>\n
We didn't know whether he cared who Brix spoke to.<\/p>\n
We didn't know why he had asked those questions in the first place.<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
"You're right."<\/p>\n
There was no reason to defend a guess simply because I had been the one to say it.<\/p>\n
Brix looked down at his canvas bag.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether our questions were making him feel responsible for solving something that had never been his to explain.<\/p>\n
He had already told us that he didn't know what the men meant.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to keep circling back to the same point until he felt he had to invent an answer to satisfy us.<\/p>\n
"You've told us what you heard," I said to him.<\/p>\n
He looked up.<\/p>\n
"That's all I have."<\/p>\n
"Then that's all we have to work with."<\/p>\n
He gave a small nod.<\/p>\n
I couldn't tell whether the words reassured him.<\/p>\n
I hoped they did.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle continued running, and Reed remained close to it.<\/p>\n
I could see how easily the work might become an excuse to avoid the harder question.<\/p>\n
As long as we had something to adjust or examine, we could keep our hands occupied.<\/p>\n
But I also knew that stopping the work would not answer anything.<\/p>\n
We could stand around discussing the diner man for the rest of the morning and still end up with the same handful of facts.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was approaching.<\/p>\n
Saturday had been mentioned in the argument Brix overheard.<\/p>\n
The coincidence was difficult to ignore, but coincidence was not proof.<\/p>\n
I repeated that to myself.<\/p>\n
I did not know whether it helped.<\/p>\n
Odom finally moved his phone farther across the workbench, clearing space in front of him.<\/p>\n
The small movement caught my attention because I had been watching the phone as if it might suddenly become important.<\/p>\n
It was just a phone.<\/p>\n
Odom had put it down.<\/p>\n
That was all.<\/p>\n
I realized I was doing the same thing with every object in the room, giving ordinary things a significance they had not earned.<\/p>\n
The canvas bag became a sign of Brix's uncertainty.<\/p>\n
The phone became a sign of a call nobody had made.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle became the answer to a question we couldn't define.<\/p>\n
None of those interpretations made the objects any different from what they were.<\/p>\n
I felt foolish for a moment.<\/p>\n
Then I reminded myself that uncertainty had a way of making people search for patterns.<\/p>\n
It didn't mean every pattern was real.<\/p>\n
"Let's stay with what we know," Reed said.<\/p>\n
Odom nodded.<\/p>\n
"That's probably best."<\/p>\n
I looked at Brix.<\/p>\n
He didn't add anything.<\/p>\n
There was no new detail to offer.<\/p>\n
I could have asked him to repeat the conversation behind the kitchen, but he had already told us what he remembered.<\/p>\n
Making him repeat it would not make his memory more complete.<\/p>\n
It would only make us hear the same words again.<\/p>\n
I let the question go.<\/p>\n
For the first time since he had spoken, I stopped trying to turn his account into an explanation.<\/p>\n
I didn't stop caring about it.<\/p>\n
I didn't decide the diner man's questions were harmless.<\/p>\n
I simply accepted that we could not yet say what they meant.<\/p>\n
That was a smaller step than I wanted.<\/p>\n
It was also an honest one.<\/p>\n
Reed kept his attention on the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
Odom remained by the workbench.<\/p>\n
Brix stayed with us, holding his bag.<\/p>\n
I stood there with them, no wiser about the diner man's intentions than I had been a few minutes earlier.<\/p>\n
But I understood one thing more clearly.<\/p>\n
If we were going to take Brix seriously, we had to take the limits of what he knew seriously too.<\/p>\n
We couldn't use his warning as permission to invent the rest.<\/p>\n
We had to leave the unknown parts unknown.<\/p>\n
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 … <\/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-40055","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\/40055","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=40055"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40075,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40055\/revisions\/40075"}],"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=40055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}