“You.”
“What about me?”
“You’re doing elementary-school math.”
Bones pointed at Toby’s worksheet.
“I’m teaching.”
Toby whispered:
“He got two wrong.”
Bones glared at him.
Sarah laughed again.
“Traitor.”
For all their roughness, Silas made one rule clear to everyone around him.
Toby was family.
But Toby was not club property.
No weapons.
No illegal errands.
No secrets that would place him in danger.
No glorifying the violence Elias had escaped.
If anyone told the boy stories, they told him about the human parts of his father.
Elias rebuilding an engine overnight for a stranded friend.
Elias losing fifty dollars playing cards and refusing to admit he was terrible at poker.
Elias singing badly to old Johnny Cash songs.
Elias once riding sixty miles because Silas had broken down and was too proud to ask for help.
Toby slowly acquired a father from pieces.
Not a legend.
Not a saint.
A flawed man.
That mattered.
One evening, Toby asked Silas:
“Was my dad a bad person?”
Silas was repairing a carburetor on the Rusty Anchor’s back patio.
He stopped.
There were questions adults could avoid.
This was not one.
Silas wiped his hands.
“Your dad did bad things.”
Toby looked down.
“So yes?”
Silas sat beside him.
“People aren’t math.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means one answer doesn’t erase the other ones.”
Toby frowned.
Silas continued:
“Your father hurt people.”
Toby’s face changed.
“He also loved you.”
“Can both be true?”
“Yes.”
Toby thought.
Silas looked toward the motorcycles.
“That’s why he left.”
“Because he was bad?”
“Because he didn’t want you becoming what he had become.”
Toby was silent.
Then:
“Are you bad?”
Bones, standing nearby, suddenly became very interested in the engine.
Silas stared at his nephew.
“Sometimes.”
Toby looked surprised by the honesty.
Silas continued:
“I’m trying to be better at some things.”
“Because of Dad?”
Silas thought.
“Because of you.”
Years passed.
The Rusty Anchor never became an ordinary place to Toby.
It remained strange.
Smoky.
Loud.
Filled with men his teachers would have advised him to avoid.
But it also became somewhere he could ask questions nobody else could answer.
Sarah remained cautious.
She never romanticized Elias’s past.
Neither did Silas, at least not around Toby.
When Toby turned sixteen, Silas offered him money for a car.
Toby refused.
“I want to earn it.”
Silas stared at him.
“Who taught you that nonsense?”
“My mom.”
“Figures.”
Toby worked afternoons at an auto shop.
The first time Silas saw him leaning over an engine, something in the boy’s posture made him stop.
Elias.
Not because Toby looked exactly like him.
Because he listened to the motor before touching anything.
Silas stood at the shop entrance.
Toby looked up.
“What?”
“Nothing.”