Before he put the car in gear I turned the voice memo on. I did it in my coat pocket, by feel, with my thumb, while he leaned across to wipe the inside of the windshield with his sleeve. A red bar came up on the screen against my hip. I zipped the pocket on it, and then felt stupid, because it was a flannel shirt pocket under the coat, not a vault, and the zipper was on the coat.
"Where are we going?" I said.
"Peach Street."
"What's on Peach Street?"
"Where I worked," Garrett said. "It is a pho place now."
It took two hours to go four miles. The plows were behind, Peach was closed at Twelfth with a sawhorse and a cop car nobody was sitting in, and he took us around by Twenty-Sixth at fifteen miles an hour with the hazards still on, because he'd forgotten to turn them off or because he hadn't. Neither of us said anything. The band came and went in the windshield. Once a bread truck passed us going the wrong way on a one-way street, and he put the signal on to let it go by.
The Peach Street Diner has been a pho place since twenty eighteen. It's called Golden Lotus now, in red letters on the window over the old diner's sign, which they never took down, so you can still read DINER behind the lotus if you tilt your head. Inside it smelled like star anise and wet coats. The woman behind the register looked up at two people coming in out of a blizzard and said sit anywhere, because there was nobody to fight over it.
They'd kept the booths. Red vinyl, split along the seams and taped over with the same silver tape, one booth after another down the wall, and in the back corner by the cooler where the pie case used to be, a booth that was only a little more cracked than the others.
Garrett stopped in front of it.
"May we sit here?"
"I don't care where we sit."
"It is the one by the pie case," he said, "and I would ask you to sit on that side." He meant the bench with its back to the room. He took the other one, facing the pass-through window, a long rectangle cut in the back wall with a metal shelf under it, and behind it a steel kitchen going quiet for the afternoon, a boy in a paper hat chopping onions. The shelf was where the plates came out. It had a bell on it, a round silver one, the kind you slap.
I sat. My back was to the door and I didn't like it.
"Hot tea, please," Garrett said to the woman when she came. "And whatever she would like."
"Nothing."
"Soup," he said. "Please. She will not eat it."
I almost laughed.
\ \ \*
He didn't start right away. He held the tea in both hands the way he'd held the popcorn bag, careful, not drinking it. The steam went up between us.
"I carried bus tubs past this booth," he said. "Maybe twenty times that winter. A gray plastic tub on my hip, from the dining room to the dish pit, six steps from that door to the pass. You sat here." He tipped his head. "Your sister sat there, mostly, on the window side. Sometimes you sat where you are sitting now."
"I came in with her a couple of times. After school. Before I had the truck."
"Twelve times, I think. I did not count them." He turned the cup a quarter turn. "I am going to say something. Please hear all of it before you answer."
"Go ahead."
"At the trial I said I had never met your sister. That was true in a way that does not count. I never spoke to her. I never took her order. I carried her dirty dishes and I looked at the floor, because that is what a dishwasher does in a dining room." He looked at me then. "You saw me here, Nell, a dozen times, a man in a gray apron with a tub. A person does not look at that person. But the eyes keep a face they were never told to keep. They bring it up later. They bring it up when it is dark and a lawyer is saying a number."
"Nine seconds."
"I did not say that."
"The lawyer did."
"Yes," he said. "That is what I mean."
I looked at the booth. I put my palm on the table, which had a crescent where someone had once stubbed out something. The vinyl under my legs was cold through my jeans. I tried to see me in it, nineteen, with a tray of something, and I couldn't. I could see Birdie across from me. Her hands. A paper napkin she'd folded into a boat. She'd always fold a napkin into a boat, and then sail it off the edge of the table into her own lap.
"She ate fries," I said.
"Fries and a chocolate milk," he said.
"Chocolate milk and fries. Every time. Chocolate milk with a straw she'd bend." I could hear it, that little squeak. "And she'd get fries nobody ordered. Not hers. Sometimes she'd already ordered, and a second plate would come out, and she'd say, I didn't order these." I turned my head, and there was the window with the bell on the shelf and the boy chopping onions. "Somebody back there just sent them. She decided it was a boy with a crush. She'd say I love you, whoever you are, to the window, and nobody ever answered. There'd just be a pair of arms in rolled-up sleeves, pushing the plate through."
"You remember that."
"It's a window. I'm looking at it."
"I did not know you remembered that," Garrett said.
The soup came and the steam rose off it and I didn't touch the spoon.
"How did you know the chocolate milk?" I said. "You said it before I did."
"She ordered it every time."
"You carried tubs."
"I carried tubs six steps from that door." He didn't look away. "Everybody in that diner watched your sister. She was loud. She sang under her breath when she thought nobody could hear, she folded the napkin into a boat, and she tipped in dimes. I do not think any of us could have told you why. She was the only person in the room who looked happy."
"Watched," I said.
"Noticed."
"You said watched."
"I mean what you mean when you say it of a stove that is on," he said, and for the first time something went through his face and out, quick, like a draft under a door. "A thing you keep one eye on. I am sorry. It is a hard word. I should have picked another."
I looked at the window.
I tried to put him in the booth. A man in a gray apron with a tub on his hip, six steps from that door. I tried to put him there at nineteen, in the corner of my eye, and I couldn't, and I couldn't make him not be there either. Maybe the face I'd handed Lou had come from this booth. Maybe my own eyes had been keeping it, and gave it back to me in the dark like a wrong coat.
"If that's what happened," I said, and heard how thin my voice was. "If I saw you here. If that's why it felt."
"I am not saying that is what happened."
"Then what are you saying?"
"I am saying it could have been."
"Could have been," I said. "That's your whole case. Could have been."
"It is all anyone has ever had," Garrett said. "You and I and the man who ran it."
He took the first sip of his tea, finally. The boy in the paper hat had stopped chopping. A radio somewhere in the kitchen was playing something with a lot of strings.
\ \ \*
It went wrong the way a rink goes wrong, not in a crash, but in a hairline. We'd been sitting there an hour. The soup had a skin on it. The woman had come by twice with the pot and topped off his cup, and twice he'd thanked her. The band had worn down and come back, and the woman at the register had turned her sign to CLOSED and not locked the door, because by then it was a kind of hospitality. I'd asked him twice how he'd known my sister, and twice he'd told me about the window, and the third time I asked he looked at his hands.
"I would like to tell you," he said, "but not in a booth."
"Then where?"
"I do not know yet. When I know, I will tell you the whole of it. I cannot tell you the first half and have you decide on that."
"You've got a lot of halves."
"Yes," he said. "I do."
My phone went off against my chest.
It buzzed once, and the screen lit under the flannel. Through the thin cloth of the shirt pocket it showed a long red bar and a number counting up, three hours and four minutes and eleven seconds. I'd unzipped the coat in the heat. I'd forgotten the coat. I put my hand on it too late.
He had stopped. His face had stopped, the way it does. He wasn't looking at the pocket. He was looking at the table, at the exact place where my hand had landed, and I watched the part of him that had been turning toward me go quiet and back away.
"It is Benny," I said. It was. "It's about Owen."
"Yes."
"I wasn't going to—"
"You may keep it," he said. "It is yours. I would only ask you to tell me when it is running. I would have said it plainer." He picked up the tea. The cup was a thick white diner cup, and I was looking at it, and I couldn't stand it, how decent he was being. He'd have let me record him all day. He'd have said please.
I hit the cup. My arm went out and the back of my hand caught it, and it went sideways off the table in a long arc of tea and landed on the floor in three pieces. Most of it went into his lap. It was hot. I know it was hot, because I saw the steam come off his jeans.
He didn't flinch. He looked at it. The woman at the register came running with a towel.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry, I didn't—"
"It is all right."
"It's not."
"It is a cup," Garrett said.
He took the towel from her and thanked her and paid for the soup, and the tea, and the cup. He left a tip on the table that was exactly twenty percent, to the penny, with a coin on top of the bills. On the way out he stopped at the pass-through. He laid his hand flat on the steel shelf next to the bell and left it there the length of a breath, the way you'd check a stove. The boy in the paper hat watched him do it. Then he took the hand back and held the door for me.
I read Benny's text standing on the sidewalk with my face burning. Owen at your mom's. Ate my leftovers. Says tell you he is fine technically.
\ \ \*
We were back at the rink at twenty past seven. Peach had reopened, and then closed again on the east end, and he'd taken us around by the lake. We hadn't said ten words since the booth. I'd turned the voice memo off in the car and told him so, and he'd said thank you, and that had made me worse.
"What will you do with it?" he asked, once, at a light on Twenty-Sixth. He meant the part already on the phone.
"Give it to Kovach."
"That is fair," he said. "There is nothing on it you should not hear again."
I looked out my window. Somebody's plastic reindeer, three weeks late, was lying on its side in a drift with its lights still on.
The lot hadn't been touched since noon. The plow had been through on Thirty-Eighth and thrown a ridge across the mouth of the lot as high as a man's waist, and the lobby lights were out. A single lamp over the dumpster. Lorraine's Jeep was gone and Benny's car was gone. The Ranger sat where I'd left it, a long white hump with the shape of a truck in it.
He stopped the Grand Prix well back of the ridge, outside the lot, on the street. He didn't turn the engine off.
"I will wait until you are in your truck," he said.
"I'm not getting in my truck. It's under three feet of snow."
"Then I will wait until it is clear."
I got out. The cold took my face off. I was halfway over the ridge in my rink shoes when I saw that somebody was already in the lot.
Cody Hartzell was at the far end with a long-handled brush, going at the roof of a black pickup with big loose swings, kicking up a cloud. His breath was coming out in long white pulls. A puck bucket was sitting on the hood. He saw me and stopped brushing and lifted the whole brush in the air at me.
"Nell! Hey. Hey, Nell."
I kept walking. He came across the lot to me with the brush over his shoulder, high-stepping in the snow, and he got there faster than I'd have thought. He stopped too close. He smelled like the drugstore cologne and cold air and a kind of hot rubber.
"Lorraine kept me till seven," he said. "Helping with the stranded folks. Had a lady with a baby, you believe that? I gave her my coat." He said it like he'd said it before. "Practice got scrubbed, so, you know, no point going home in this. Figured I'd dig out. You okay? You look like you saw something."
"I'm fine."
"Is that his car?" He turned his chin, easy, over my shoulder at the street. "Out there. The tan one."
I didn't turn around.
"I heard about it," Cody said. "Everybody heard. That's insane, Nell. That's your kid. I hear you. I'd be out of my mind." He leaned on the back of the Ranger, a hand on the tailgate, on the snow, and it gave under him, and he stayed leaning on it like it was his. "I'd have lost it. Honest to God."
"Cody."
"I'm just saying I get it." He lowered his voice, not much. "I knew Owen's aunt a little, you know. Everybody did. Pretty girl, mouth on her. She'd say anything to anybody. We'd all just go, Birdie." He shook his head and smiled, a smile that came and went like a light somebody hits by accident. "That's all I'm saying. It's a sad thing, what happened."
The Grand Prix was still out on the street with its headlights on. I could hear the engine from here. It hadn't moved. Cody turned around and looked right at it for a second, and the headlights looked back at him, and neither of them blinked.
"Anyway." He pushed off the truck. "Go home, get warm."
He walked back up the lot and swung the brush at his pickup. I had my hand on the door of the Ranger, trying to find it under the snow, when I heard the boots behind me again, quick, and he slapped the hood twice with the flat of his hand, the way you'd pat a horse.
"Tell Owen tryouts are still Saturday," Cody said. "Eight o'clock. I'll go easy on him."