Epilogue
Rafferty
That's the part I like. There's no ceremony in it.
A road engineer in Carson City had a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet said thirteen miles of two-lane between the county line and the new bypass carried four hundred vehicles a day and cost eleven thousand dollars a year to maintain, and a man who has never heard of any of us put a line through it.
We went out to watch, which Bishop declared was "not a run" and which involved nine motorcycles.
"It's a run," Judah said.
"It's not a run."
"There's nine of us and we're all going the same place at the same time on motorcycles."
"It's not a run," Bishop said, and got on his bike.
The county man's name was Ordo?ez and he had a clipboard and no idea what he'd walked into.
"You folks lost?"
"We're here for the road," Bishop said.
"It's a road."
"We know."
Ordo?ez looked at nine motorcycles, a tow truck, a man with a cane, and a cooler.
"Is this a protest?"
"It's the opposite of a protest," Judah said.
"There's a cooler."
"There's a cooler," Judah agreed.
Ordo?ez thought about that for a while, and then he did the thing that made me like him permanently, which was shrug and hand Judah a sign and say, "Well, hold that end up straight, then."
Sunday came in the wrecker, because she wanted to bring something and it wouldn't fit on a bike.
It was the crosses.
She'd gone out over three weekends and pulled every single one — thirty-one of them, plus the one she'd put up for Teodor in August, and I helped with eleven of those and never once said a word while I did it.
They came out of the gravel easy. Two pieces of fence pine wired together, that's all they ever were, and she'd hammered thirty-one of them into the shoulder of a highway at night, alone, for two years, because nobody else was going to.
She put them in the bed of the truck and drove them to Mile 68.
DAWN'S was still standing. Still is. The county owns the parcel now, having taken it off the Herrick estate at auction for less than what Gerald Herrick paid for it in 1994, which I choose to enjoy.
Sunday set the crosses along the front of that building in a row under the window, all thirty-two, in the order she'd put them up.
Then she taped a sheet of paper to the inside of the glass with every name on it in that small neat handwriting, and the dates, and at the top, on its own line: DAWN ELLERY MARSH, 1955–1994, PROPRIETOR.
Nobody's ever going to read it. That's the whole point of it. She said so herself.
"Somebody might," I said.
"Rafferty, they closed the road."
"Somebody's kid's going to ride a dirt bike in here in nine years and see a wall of names and be permanently altered."
"That's a beautiful thought," Sunday said, "and I hope it ruins him."
She stood there a while looking at the row.
"I thought this would feel like finishing," she said.
"It doesn't?"
"It feels like putting down something heavy and finding out my arms still do the thing.
" She pushed her hair back. "I dispatched Tuesday night and a woman called in off the 95 with a flat and I kept her talking for thirty-one minutes and I did not breathe properly for one of them.
It's not the road. It was never the road.
I'm just going to be a person who thinks the phone is a countdown, probably forever. "
"Probably."
"You're supposed to say it gets better."
"I don't know if it does," I said. "I know you're not doing it in an apartment with one chair anymore."
She looked at me for a second.
"That's the correct answer," she said, "and I hate that you've gotten good at this."
Emmett got the jukebox out. It took four of us.
He says it'll run once he gets a part, and he's been saying that for six weeks, and Delgado offered to paint it, and the entire club took a formal vote in chapel to prohibit Delgado from painting anything ever again, which passed unanimously and which I think about when I need to feel good about the world.
Nash walks with a cane and will for another month. He came out for the barriers. He stood at the south end with his weight on it and looked at the sign for a while and then said, "Huh."
"Don't," said Sunday.
"What?"
"It's a whole thing," I told him. "Don't ask."
Teodor never turned up. I want that in here because it would be easy to leave out and because leaving it out would be a lie about what this kind of work actually is.
We looked. We looked for four months. Bishop had two men on it full time through August and Herrick opened every book his father ever kept and Sunday read a hundred and nine reports out of three counties, and there is not one piece of paper anywhere in the state of Nevada with that kid's name on it after the ninth of that month.
His mother came out in September. She stood at the south barrier for about twenty minutes and then asked whether it had been quick, and Sunday said, "I don't know," which was true, and which was the hardest true thing I have ever watched somebody choose.
Afterward she sat in the truck for a long time.
"You could've told her yes," I said.
"I know."
"Would've been kinder."
"It would have been easier," Sunday said, "and I've been the woman who says the easy thing for eighteen years, and I'm retiring."
Marlowe left for the north on the Sunday after, and the two of them said goodbye in the lot from about eleven feet apart, which is the closest thing to a hug either of them could manage.
"Call me," Marlowe said.
"You hate the phone."
"I hate the phone with everybody else. You're the only person I've met who doesn't need the first four minutes explained." She got in the truck. "Sunday. The thing you're not telling him."
Sunday didn't move.
"I'm not going to ask," Marlowe said. "I did that once already this month and it cost a kid a femur, so I've decided I'm out of the business.
But you've got one, and I know the shape of a woman carrying one, and I want you to know that if the day comes where you can't carry it by yourself there's a woman in Idaho with a bad attitude and a spare room. "
"That's the nicest threat anybody's ever made to me."
"I've got a knack," Marlowe said, and drove north.
She's got two chairs in her apartment now. I bought the second one, badly, from a place in Tonopah, and it's the wrong color and it's too low and neither of us will say anything about it because it's ours.
She still doesn't look at people. That hasn't changed and it isn't going to; she looks at chins in the grocery store and at collarbones in the clubhouse and it took Judah about four days to stop being hurt by it and about four weeks to start deliberately standing so she wouldn't have to do the work.
That's the club. Nobody said anything. They just started standing different.
She looks at me. That's the whole arrangement. She looks at me for as long as she wants and I let her and it costs her nothing, and I have gotten used to being looked at like that, which I would not have believed possible a year ago.
She's kept the job, which surprised everybody but me.
Hollis gave her days when she asked and she took nights instead, and when I asked her why she said, "Because it's the one thing I was already doing right," which is the closest that woman gets to sentiment.
There's a new legal pad in the door pocket of that wrecker.
I've never read it. I know what's on it, because in January a woman called in off the 95 at two in the morning with a voice that had gone flat and delayed, and Sunday kept her on the line for fifty-one minutes and sent Petra and called me at three to say, in a voice I'd never heard her use, "She's fine.
She was just tired. She was just tired, Rafferty. "
There's going to be another road. Everybody in that clubhouse knows it and nobody's said it out loud, and the pad in her door is what it looks like when somebody stops pretending they're going to stop.
I want to put one thing in about myself before the end, because Sunday's the one with the gift and it'd be easy to let this be entirely her story.
I haven't fixed anything.
I still get the feeling. Somebody raised his voice at Emmett in the garage in October about a bill and I was across that bay before I'd decided to be, and Emmett looked at me and said, "Sit down, Raff, he's just loud," and I sat down, and it took everything I had.
What's different is about four seconds. That's it. That's the whole harvest of the worst year of my life: I have bought myself roughly four seconds between the feeling and the hands, and I bought them by watching a kid go off a flatbed because I didn't have them.
Bishop says four seconds is a career. Bishop would.
Emmett says it's a start and then changes the subject, which is how I know he means it.
It was the second week of November, on the porch at the clubhouse, cold enough to see your breath, and she had her feet up on the rail and my jacket on because she always has my jacket on, and it was the kind of nothing Tuesday I told her in a diner was the only thing I'd ever wanted.
I asked her once.
"Sunday."
"Mm."
"At 74," I said. "When you looked at him. You got yours."
She didn't move.
"Yes," she said.
"You want to tell me?"
I want to be clear that I knew the answer before I asked. I've known since she sat down on that shoulder with a bloody nose and said later in a voice that meant no.
"There wasn't anything," Sunday said. "It was too fast. I got about a second of a ceiling and then it was gone."
She's a good liar. That's not an insult; she's had eighteen years of practice at a very specialized kind of it, and she's better at it than anybody I've ever met.
Her voice didn't do a thing. Her hands stayed on the coffee.
She looked right at me the entire time, which is the thing she never used to be able to do and which she has now weaponized against me personally.
But she'd said a ceiling I didn't recognize on the shoulder that night at 74, out loud, before she knew she was going to keep it. She said it into my jacket while I was trying to find out if her nose was broken.
I didn't recognize it. Not I didn't see it.
Here's what I did with that.
Nothing.
I've been a hammer my whole life. I put a sixty-one-year-old man against a fence because I couldn't ask a question, and a kid got a leg full of pins ninety seconds later, and I have spent this entire year learning exactly one thing, which is that there is a kind of strength that looks like doing nothing at all and that I have never once had it.
So I sat on that porch and I let her keep it.
"Okay," I said.
And Sunday Marsh turned her head and looked at me — full on, no chin, no trick — and I watched her understand that I knew, and I watched her understand that I was going to let it stand anyway.
Her eyes went wet and she didn't wipe them, and she reached over and took my hand, and we sat there in the cold for a while not saying anything.
That's it. That's the whole thing. That's the most tender I have ever managed to be in thirty-six years and it consisted of shutting my mouth on a porch.
I'll take it. It's a start.
There's one more thing and I only put it here because Bishop told me to write it down.
When they cleared the shoulder at Mile 66 before the barriers went up, the county grader turned up the culvert wreck.
Not the whole thing — thirty-two years of desert had taken most of it — but the frame was still there under two feet of dirt where nobody had ever bothered to look, because in 1994 the file said driver error and closed.
They pulled it out and set it on the flat, and Herrick came and looked at it, and then he called us instead of the scrap buyer, which I think was the closest that man could get to an amends.
There was a second frame under it.
Brown. Bench seat. Cracked dash. A dent in the driver's-side rear quarter with paint in it that wasn't its own.
He'd never left. Thirty-two years of driving north on a road he was already buried beside.
And in what was left of the driver's footwell, under the pedals, there was a key.
Not a car key. Too big, wrong shape, brass gone black and rippled the way brass goes when it's been through a fire and then thirty years of ground. It had a stamped head with a shape on it we all recognized, because eight of us in that lot were wearing the same shape on our backs.
Sunday picked it up before anybody could tell her not to and turned it over in her palm and didn't see anything at all, because objects aren't her department, and she said, "This is somebody else's problem," and handed it to Wrenley Sayer, who had gone very quiet about four minutes earlier.
Wrenley closed her hand on it.
Deacon put a hand on the small of her back, which is a thing I have watched that man do about a hundred times and which I finally understood the mechanics of that afternoon.
"Wren."
"Give me a second."
"Wren—"
"It's cold," she said, "and I don't mean temperature." She opened her eyes. "There's a hallway. Board walls, not drywall. Somebody's carrying it and they're in a hurry, and they're going down."
"Down where?"
"Down stairs, Bishop. Under something." She handed it off like it had gotten heavy. "And there's a fire, but the fire's not now, the fire's already happened, this thing came out of a fire before whoever's carrying it ever picked it up."
Bishop Cardell stood in a salvage yard holding a scorched brass key in his fist and looked at it for a long, long time.
"Roy Ballard was thirty-one in 1994," he said. "He was a mechanic out of Beatty who did side work for cash. He never rode. He was never in a club. He never set foot in Cold Fork, Idaho, in his life."
"So?"
"So there's no reason on God's earth," Bishop said, "for a man like that to be carrying a key to my clubhouse."
Nobody said anything.
Then Wrenley said, "Bishop."
"Yeah."
"That's the third one," she said.
And Bishop Cardell put the key in his pocket, and said, "Yeah. I know."