I stayed beside the workbench and tried to leave the questions where they belonged.<\/p>\n
They had not disappeared.<\/p>\n
I had simply stopped expecting them to answer themselves.<\/p>\n
Reed was still working near the Shovelhead, and Odom remained close enough to follow what he was doing.<\/p>\n
Brix stood nearby with his canvas bag.<\/p>\n
The four of us were in the same room, surrounded by the same tools, listening to the same engine.<\/p>\n
Yet none of us seemed able to return completely to the morning we had been having before Brix spoke.<\/p>\n
I couldn't blame him for that.<\/p>\n
He had told us something that mattered to him.<\/p>\n
We had listened, and now we had to decide how to carry that information without pretending we understood it.<\/p>\n
I looked at the phone resting on the workbench.<\/p>\n
Odom had put it there earlier, and it had stayed there through most of our conversation.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether I had been watching it because I expected him to call somebody.<\/p>\n
Then I realized I had no reason to expect that.<\/p>\n
He hadn't said he was going to make a call.<\/p>\n
He hadn't suggested that a phone call would explain anything.<\/p>\n
I had supplied that possibility myself.<\/p>\n
I looked away.<\/p>\n
It was becoming a habit, this search for meaning in things that had no clear meaning yet.<\/p>\n
I didn't like how quickly it had taken hold of me.<\/p>\n
"How's it going?" I asked Reed.<\/p>\n
He glanced up.<\/p>\n
"All right."<\/p>\n
I waited, thinking he might say more.<\/p>\n
He didn't.<\/p>\n
I understood why.<\/p>\n
There was no need to turn an ordinary question about the work into another discussion about the diner man.<\/p>\n
I nodded and let him continue.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead had been running when Brix first began speaking.<\/p>\n
That fact kept returning to me because the motorcycle had been the center of the conversation before I understood why Brix was worried.<\/p>\n
Now the machine seemed to occupy two different places in my mind.<\/p>\n
There was the motorcycle we had been working on.<\/p>\n
Then there was the motorcycle the diner man had asked about.<\/p>\n
They were the same machine, of course.<\/p>\n
But I had started treating them as if the second one belonged to some hidden situation that we had not yet discovered.<\/p>\n
That might have been true.<\/p>\n
It might not have been.<\/p>\n
I had to stop making the distinction do more work than the facts allowed.<\/p>\n
Brix had heard questions about the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He had not told us that he had found something on it.<\/p>\n
He had not told us that he knew what the diner man wanted.<\/p>\n
He had only said that the man wanted to know what he had seen.<\/p>\n
Those words were troubling enough.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to change them.<\/p>\n
Odom moved slightly beside the workbench.<\/p>\n
His phone remained where it was.<\/p>\n
I watched him for a moment, then made myself look back at Reed.<\/p>\n
I had been waiting for somebody else to take charge of the uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Maybe I wanted Reed to announce that he understood the situation.<\/p>\n
Maybe I wanted Odom to suggest a practical next step.<\/p>\n
Maybe I wanted Brix to remember one more detail.<\/p>\n
None of those things was something I could demand.<\/p>\n
Reed could work on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
Odom could listen.<\/p>\n
Brix could tell us what he remembered.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, we each had to live with what we didn't know.<\/p>\n
I found that harder than I expected.<\/p>\n
I liked problems that could be examined from different angles until something became clear.<\/p>\n
This one had too many empty spaces.<\/p>\n
Every time I tried to fill one, I had to admit that I was guessing.<\/p>\n
So I stopped.<\/p>\n
Not perfectly.<\/p>\n
My thoughts still went back to the argument behind the diner.<\/p>\n
I still wondered what the men had meant when they talked about something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
I still wondered why the diner man had asked whether Brix had been inside the shop before.<\/p>\n
But I no longer treated each question as if it required an answer from someone standing in front of me.<\/p>\n
Sometimes a question remained a question.<\/p>\n
That did not make it unimportant.<\/p>\n
It only meant we had to be patient with it.<\/p>\n
"You're quiet," Odom said.<\/p>\n
I looked at him.<\/p>\n
"Trying to think less."<\/p>\n
He gave me a brief look that suggested he understood more than I had explained.<\/p>\n
"Probably not a bad idea."<\/p>\n
I almost laughed.<\/p>\n
It wasn't because the situation was funny.<\/p>\n
It was because the advice was so simple that I should have followed it earlier.<\/p>\n
I looked toward Brix.<\/p>\n
He had not added anything to his account.<\/p>\n
I was glad nobody was asking him to.<\/p>\n
He had already done what we needed him to do by telling us what happened as he remembered it.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to make him feel that the usefulness of his warning depended on whether he could solve the mystery behind it.<\/p>\n
He couldn't.<\/p>\n
Neither could we.<\/p>\n
The engine continued to run.<\/p>\n
Reed kept his attention on the work.<\/p>\n
Odom stayed near the bench.<\/p>\n
I remained beside them, listening without trying to turn every sound into a message.<\/p>\n
For a while, I managed to think about the work without immediately returning to the diner.<\/p>\n
Then Saturday came back into my mind.<\/p>\n
Forty-nine hours had been the amount of time left when Brix first spoke.<\/p>\n
We had already spent some of it discussing what he had told us.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I knew that coincidence alone did not establish a plan.<\/p>\n
I knew that the mention of a day did not tell us what would happen on it.<\/p>\n
Still, I couldn't make myself forget it.<\/p>\n
I didn't think I needed to.<\/p>\n
Remembering something was different from claiming to understand it.<\/p>\n
That distinction became my way of keeping the situation in perspective.<\/p>\n
I could remember every word Brix had given us.<\/p>\n
I could pay attention if he offered another detail.<\/p>\n
I could keep the motorcycle in front of me and the questions in the back of my mind.<\/p>\n
What I could not do was turn the information into a conclusion simply because waiting felt uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
I looked at the canvas bag in Brix's hand.<\/p>\n
Then at Odom's phone.<\/p>\n
Then at the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
They were ordinary details in an ordinary room.<\/p>\n
The conversation had made them feel different, but I didn't have to let that feeling decide what they meant.<\/p>\n
I took a breath and returned my attention to Reed.<\/p>\n
For the moment, that was enough.<\/p>\n
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 … <\/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-40058","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\/40058","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=40058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40078,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40058\/revisions\/40078"}],"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=40058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}