The evening everything changed began with a twenty-dollar bill. Hank said he had left it on the kitchen counter. Leo had been in the room, so Hank decided the missing money belonged to him. Leo offered to help look. Hank called that answer an insult. There was shouting, a hand gripping Leo's shirt, and a hard impact against the edge of a table that drove the air from his lungs. Later a clinic would confirm two injured ribs. That night no one took him to a clinic at all.
Leo stayed awake listening to the house settle. He could hear the television in Hank's room and the soft click of a ceiling fan turning above him. He knew Hank would come looking for him in the morning, if only because Leo had begun to ask questions no one wanted recorded. He also knew that if he left without saying goodbye, Jaden might believe he had been abandoned again.
He wrote them a note on the back of a grocery receipt. 'I am going to find help. You did not do anything wrong. Keep each other safe.' He put it beneath Mia's school notebook, where she would find it before Hank did. Then he opened the bedroom window, eased himself onto the narrow roof below it, and climbed down the drainpipe despite the pain in his side.
He had not felt brave. He had been so frightened his hands shook against the metal. The important thing, he would later realize, was that he climbed down anyway.
For three weeks he moved south and west by bus when he could persuade a driver to take him without questions, by walking along roads when he could not, and once in the back of a produce truck after the driver took pity on him. He avoided shelters because he feared anyone who asked his name would send him straight to Hank. He slept beneath picnic tables, behind a closed tire store, and in the dry bed of a culvert while trucks passed overhead like distant thunder. Every day he promised himself that the next town would be different, that he would find a shop willing to let him sweep the floor in exchange for lunch and a place to sleep.
He had no way of knowing whether Hank was searching. The thought followed him so closely that he turned away from cars resembling Hank's silver Dodge Ram even when they belonged to strangers. Sometimes the fear made him move too quickly, taking a longer path under the sun because a service station looked crowded. Sometimes it made him too cautious, waiting until darkness before approaching a water tap that had been plainly visible all afternoon.
The old Sinclair station appeared at the end of a day when Leo had nearly decided to sit down and stop walking. He saw the tilted sign first, then the dead pumps, then the garage doors sagging on their rails. The property had no working electricity and no reliable water, but it held enough walls to break the wind and enough scrap to make his hands feel useful again.
He swept one corner of the garage with a stiff bundle of weeds. He arranged salvageable bolts in a muffin tin, sorted screwdrivers by size, and set aside a half-dozen hand tools that still worked. These tasks were absurdly small compared with the problem of his own survival, yet he found comfort in them. A loose nut could be tightened. A broken spring could be identified. Even a ruined bicycle might move again if the bearings were cleaned and the chain persuaded to stay on its gears.