One Thursday she arrived with a design for a helmet that used a pattern of marigolds around a faded gray road. Jimmy set out paper samples and asked why she had chosen those colors. She told him about the flowers beside the fence and her brother's habit of buying them. He listened, then pulled out an old color chart from the lower drawer of his workbench. Luther's handwriting appeared in the margin beside the yellows and oranges, criticizing three shades as too cheerful for an actual desert sunset.
Sky traced the handwriting with her eyes. "He used that word," she said. "Cheerful. He said a painting should make you feel something, but it didn't have to make you happy." Jimmy nodded.
"He was impossible to please when he got hold of a color chart." For a while they shared small stories that carried no great lesson, just the texture of a person they both missed. Luther loved blackberry pie but never bought it because he said he could eat a whole one alone. He whistled off-key. He had once painted an entire tank the wrong shade of green rather than admit Jimmy was right about the primer.
On Friday, Gregory invited Sky to look through the garage's old photographs with Lucy present. Most were ordinary: charity rides, birthdays, repairs completed just before deadlines, and group portraits in which somebody always had his eyes closed. Sky found a photograph of Luther holding a tiny pink mitten and stared at it for a long time. "That was mine," she said. Gregory took the picture from her just long enough to look at the date written on the back. It had been taken a few months before the crash.
"I remember that glove," Gregory told her. "He said somebody important had forgotten it." Sky smiled without looking away from the photograph. "I used to put one mitten on him and keep the other," she said.
"He couldn't get it onto his hand, but he'd try." It was such an ordinary, ridiculous memory that Gregory had to look down. He had spent years telling everyone Luther was the best mechanic he ever knew. He had not known about the mittens, the pancakes, or the little girl trying to make her grown brother look small.
As Lucy examined the rest of the folder, she found a reference to an incident at the group home where Sky had briefly lived before Luther's death. The reference appeared in a caseworker's note attached to his custody petition. It described an allegation that a staff member had used inappropriate restraint during a dispute over personal property. The document did not contain a finding, and the underlying report was restricted. Lucy made a copy of the reference and added it to the questions she intended to give a family-law attorney.
"We can't take a summary and call it proof," she told Gregory. He was about to object, but she continued. "If Luther tried to raise concerns, that matters. If an investigation happened, the result matters too.