He had spent years in the company of men who filled every uncomfortable silence with noise. Evan had been the exception. Evan could sit beside a campfire for half an hour without saying anything, then ask a question so precise it felt as though he had been listening to the silence itself.
"How did you know my dad?" Eli asked eventually.
Cole turned toward him. "We fixed motorcycles together first. Then we traveled together. We were friends a long time."
"Were you really a navigator?"
"What makes you ask that?"
"Mom let me read some of his stories. One of them said you could find north without a compass."
"Your father exaggerated. I could find a diner without a compass. That's different."
Eli almost smiled. "He wrote that you knew where you were going when everybody else was lost."
"That isn't entirely true either." Cole glanced at Mara. "But I was good with maps. Evan wasn't. He'd take a shortcut and we'd discover we'd driven forty miles in the wrong direction. Then he'd say it was a scenic route."
The boy laughed. It was a small, bright sound, and Cole felt the shock of hearing something so unmistakably familiar. Evan had laughed that way when he was about to insist that a bad decision had been a good adventure all along. Mara looked down quickly, blinking. It was clear she had heard it too.
"He wrote about a time you slept under a bridge because he took the wrong road," Eli said.
"We didn't sleep under a bridge. We waited under one until a thunderstorm passed."
"He said you snored so loud a truck driver called the police."
"That part is a complete fabrication."
Eli leaned closer. "Really?"
"The truck driver didn't call the police. He offered me cough medicine."
This time the boy laughed hard enough to cover his mouth. Mara smiled involuntarily, then looked as though she had startled herself. Cole had not intended to entertain them. He had reached for the simplest honest memories because the larger ones were too painful. Yet for a few moments the diner felt like an ordinary place where a child might enjoy stories about a father he had never had the chance to know.
Mara waited until Eli began eating again before asking the question that had been waiting between them. "When did you last see Evan?"
Cole stared into his bowl. He remembered a stretch of New Mexico highway, heat shimmering above the asphalt, and Evan waving over his shoulder as he rode away. But he also remembered later missed calls, messages that went unanswered, and his own slow decision to stop trying. For years he had blurred those memories together until the chronology no longer seemed to matter. Now every detail might matter more than he understood.
"Eight years ago," he said. "We'd been traveling different routes for a while. We weren't talking as often. I thought he needed space. Then I couldn't reach him at all."