Nolan left before dawn with a thermos of coffee, a paper bag of sandwiches, and a tank of gas he had paid for with nearly the last of his available money. The interstate was almost empty in the first gray light. He kept the radio off because every song seemed to claim an emotion he wasn't sure he owned yet. The metal box rode on the passenger seat. Beside it lay the modern photograph and the older amber print, separated by twenty-two years and joined by the same unmistakable face. Nolan had spent so much time studying both that he could close his eyes and see the angle of the man's jaw in either one.
He drove through mountains softened by low cloud and valleys where farmhouses appeared and vanished in the mist. At the first rest stop he watched an elderly father and an adult son arguing cheerfully over the best route, then realized he was studying them with something close to hunger. They had the easy irritation of people who'd known each other too long to be careful with every word. Nolan had no idea what his first words to Elias would be. He imagined asking why, imagined saying nothing, imagined turning around after one look because the reality might be too difficult. He had dreamed of his father appearing so often as a child that the possibility of meeting him now felt almost like meeting the person who had been absent from a dream.
Marrow's Gap lay in a valley beyond a river, a town small enough that its water tower was visible from almost every approach. There was a diner near the square, a school with a hand-painted mascot on the gym wall, and a hardware store displaying snow shovels beside bags of rock salt. The garage Nolan sought had no proper business sign, only a wooden board nailed above the open bay doors. REPAIRS, it said. Nothing more.
Nolan drove past once, then circled the block because he needed a moment to make the scene real. An old pickup stood outside, its bed full of salvaged metal and a coil of garden hose. A faded blue sedan occupied the front bay, and someone's legs extended beneath it on a rolling mechanic's board. He parked across the street and turned off the engine. The cold had settled inside the truck during the long drive, but he remained still, listening to the tick of cooling metal. All the years of wondering where his father had gone had narrowed to a short walk across an ordinary town street.
The man beneath the sedan reached for a wrench with the impatient precision of someone who knew exactly which tool he wanted. Nolan noticed a small wet patch beneath the left rear corner of the vehicle and the shape of the man's boots, worn unevenly in a way he recognized from his own years of standing on shop floors. Everything about the scene was ordinary, which made the significance of it almost unbearable. He crossed the street and stopped at the garage entrance. The man kept working, unaware of him. Nolan stood beneath the open door, breathing the familiar smell of brake fluid and old steel.