They ate dinner at home. Miles talked about basketball, a college coach who might come to a tournament next month, and a friend whose car had failed its inspection. Lennox listened, sometimes asking questions and sometimes simply enjoying the fact that he was there. Afterward they carried their glasses to the front porch and sat on the top step, where Samuel had once sat with Lennox after a very different drive home.
The evening smelled of cut grass and wet pavement. A neighbor's porch light came on across the street, and a moth battered itself gently against the glass. Lennox took the new license from Miles, looked at it once more, and handed it back. He knew what conversation was coming next; he had heard variations of it from his father, uncles, teachers, and older friends.
"You know what Grandpa Samuel told me after we got stopped when I was nine?" he asked.
Miles nodded. "Hands where they can see them. Say yes, sir. Come home."
"That's right. He was trying to protect me, and there was nothing wrong with that. He was also carrying a lot of pain that he didn't know how to explain to a little boy."
"Were you scared that day?"
"Terrified. I thought every deputy would be like the one who stopped him, because the only one I knew had been cruel."
"And now you're sheriff."
"And now I know most people are more complicated than one uniform, one job, or one bad decision. That doesn't make the bad decisions harmless. It means we have to judge them accurately and refuse to protect wrongdoing just because somebody wears the same patch we do."
Miles turned the license over in his hands. "If I get stopped, do I tell them you're my dad?"
Lennox thought about the question. There were families in the county who would not hesitate to mention a sheriff's name, a judge's friendship, or a cousin on the county board. They believed relationships ought to make the machinery of authority kinder to them than it was to strangers. Lennox had spent the past year trying to dismantle precisely that expectation.
"You can tell people who your father is if it comes up naturally," he said. "But you shouldn't need my name to receive fair treatment. If you make a mistake, be truthful about it. Keep your hands visible, don't make sudden movements, and don't try to win an argument on a dangerous roadside. If something goes wrong, get home and tell me. We'll handle it with the facts."
"What if they don't believe me?"
"Then we find the records. If there aren't enough records, we keep asking the right questions. And if someone made a mistake, including you, we say that too."
Miles was quiet for a moment. Then he looked toward the Bentley in the driveway. "Do you still think about the windows?"
"Sometimes. Mostly when I look at Grandpa's photograph."
"Did you ever fix it?"
"The shop repaired the corner as well as they could. It's framed in my office now."
Miles smiled. "He would have liked that."
"He would have told me the frame cost too much."