The mention of Saturday stayed with me longer than anything else Brix had said.<\/p>\n
It was the one detail that gave the conversation a deadline.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The men behind the diner had argued about something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
I could not ignore the overlap.<\/p>\n
But I could not explain it either.<\/p>\n
I stood near the workbench and tried to think about those two facts without forcing them together.<\/p>\n
The first belonged to us.<\/p>\n
The second belonged to the conversation Brix had overheard.<\/p>\n
Whether they were connected in a meaningful way was something we did not know.<\/p>\n
I wanted to believe that a clear connection would eventually become obvious.<\/p>\n
I had no guarantee that it would.<\/p>\n
Sometimes information arrived in pieces that did not make sense until later.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it never made sense at all.<\/p>\n
I didn't know which kind of situation we were in.<\/p>\n
That was the part I found hardest to accept.<\/p>\n
I could wait for more information.<\/p>\n
I could not make it arrive on a schedule.<\/p>\n
Reed remained focused on the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
Odom stayed close to the workbench.<\/p>\n
Brix held his canvas bag, having already told us everything he remembered.<\/p>\n
There was no new development to respond to.<\/p>\n
No new detail had appeared.<\/p>\n
The situation was the same one we had been trying to understand since Brix began talking.<\/p>\n
I looked at Reed.<\/p>\n
"Saturday still feels a long way off," I said.<\/p>\n
He glanced up.<\/p>\n
"It isn't."<\/p>\n
That was all he said.<\/p>\n
He didn't need to add anything.<\/p>\n
The time was moving whether we were ready or not.<\/p>\n
I thought about how I had first heard the warning.<\/p>\n
At that moment, I had wanted somebody to connect the questions, the motorcycle, and the argument into one explanation.<\/p>\n
I had wanted to know what the diner man was looking for.<\/p>\n
I had wanted to know why he had asked about Reed.<\/p>\n
Most of all, I had wanted to know what Brix had supposedly seen.<\/p>\n
I still wanted those answers.<\/p>\n
But I was beginning to understand that wanting them did not give us the right to invent them.<\/p>\n
I could not turn the word found into a description of an object.<\/p>\n
I could not decide that the motorcycle contained something simply because the diner man had asked about it.<\/p>\n
I could not decide that Reed knew more than he had said.<\/p>\n
And I could not assume that Brix had missed an important detail merely because he had not understood the conversation.<\/p>\n
Each of those conclusions would take us beyond the facts.<\/p>\n
I wanted to avoid that.<\/p>\n
The danger of guessing was not only that we might be wrong.<\/p>\n
It was that we might begin responding to our own guesses instead of to what had actually happened.<\/p>\n
Once that started, it would be difficult to tell the difference.<\/p>\n
I looked at the phone on the workbench.<\/p>\n
Odom had left it there.<\/p>\n
I looked at Brix's canvas bag.<\/p>\n
He was still holding it.<\/p>\n
I looked at the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
Reed was still working beside it.<\/p>\n
The details had become familiar through repetition.<\/p>\n
They also reminded me of what we actually had in front of us.<\/p>\n
A phone.<\/p>\n
A bag.<\/p>\n
A motorcycle.<\/p>\n
A few remembered sentences.<\/p>\n
A memorial ride approaching on Saturday.<\/p>\n
That was not enough to solve the problem.<\/p>\n
It was enough to keep us from pretending we had solved it.<\/p>\n
I shifted my attention toward Brix.<\/p>\n
"Are you sure that's everything you remember?" I asked.<\/p>\n
I immediately wondered whether I was making the same mistake again.<\/p>\n
Brix looked at me.<\/p>\n
"That's everything I remember about what they said."<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
He had answered clearly.<\/p>\n
I wasn't going to ask him to produce something more.<\/p>\n
"Thank you for telling us," I said.<\/p>\n
He looked down at his bag, then back at me.<\/p>\n
"Didn't know if it would help."<\/p>\n
"It helped us understand what you heard."<\/p>\n
That was true.<\/p>\n
It had not given us an explanation, but it had given us information we had not possessed before.<\/p>\n
There was value in that, even if the information left us with more questions.<\/p>\n
Brix gave a small nod.<\/p>\n
I didn't press him further.<\/p>\n
Odom had heard the exchange.<\/p>\n
He didn't add anything.<\/p>\n
Reed kept working.<\/p>\n
I felt the urge to say something about the memorial ride, but I couldn't think of anything that would improve the situation.<\/p>\n
We all knew Saturday was approaching.<\/p>\n
We all knew the motorcycle mattered to the ride.<\/p>\n
We all knew the diner man's questions had made the work feel different.<\/p>\n
Repeating those facts would not make them easier to manage.<\/p>\n
So I remained quiet.<\/p>\n
I had once believed that being prepared meant having a plan for every possible problem.<\/p>\n
Now I wasn't sure that was possible.<\/p>\n
We didn't know what problem we were facing.<\/p>\n
We didn't know whether the diner man intended to do anything else.<\/p>\n
We didn't know what he believed Brix had seen.<\/p>\n
A plan based on invented answers would not be preparation.<\/p>\n
It would only be another way of pretending we had control.<\/p>\n
The work in front of us was real.<\/p>\n
The uncertainty was real too.<\/p>\n
I could give attention to both.<\/p>\n
Reed could continue working toward Saturday.<\/p>\n
Odom could keep the information in mind.<\/p>\n
Brix had done what he could by telling us what he remembered.<\/p>\n
I could stop demanding that the morning produce a complete explanation before it was over.<\/p>\n
That was the decision I made, though I knew I might have to make it again.<\/p>\n
The word Saturday still troubled me.<\/p>\n
I would remember it.<\/p>\n
I would not pretend to know what it meant.<\/p>\n
The mention of Saturday stayed with me longer than anything else Brix had said. It was the one detail that gave the conversation a deadline. The memorial ride was on … <\/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-40060","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\/40060","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=40060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40080,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40060\/revisions\/40080"}],"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=40060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}