The tarnished silver lighter struck the mahogany bar with a sound no louder than a spoon dropped into a sink. Yet every conversation inside the Rusty Anchor seemed to stop at once.
Thirty men who had spent their lives making other people uneasy turned toward a ten-year-old boy in an oversized corduroy jacket, and the boy wished he had never come through the door.
Arthur "Bones" Harrison lifted the lighter between two thick fingers and stared at an engraving that had not been seen in Bakersfield for fifteen years.
A jukebox was playing somewhere behind the pool tables, but Bones barely heard it. His scarred face lost its color, and his grip tightened until the veins stood out along his wrist. "Sal," he said, so quietly the bartender almost missed it, "turn that music off." The boy watched Sal reach beneath the counter, and the room fell into a silence that made the heat outside seem suddenly welcome.
The boy's name was Toby Harris, and he had not come looking for trouble, a fight, or a place among the men who wore black leather vests. He had come hoping to sell a few objects that had belonged to his dead father. At home, his mother had two weeks before the bank's scheduled sale of their small house, and an oxygen machine beside her chair made a constant mechanical whisper that Toby had begun to hear even in his dreams. He thought a lighter, a pocket watch, a gold ring, and a brass compass might buy them a little more time.
That morning had begun with a pot rattling on the kitchen stove and a cough from the bedroom. The bungalow stood at the end of a Bakersfield street where the summer sun had burned the lawns pale and left long cracks in the sidewalks. Toby woke on the foldout couch because the second bedroom had become a storage room for medical supplies, spare tubing, and unopened envelopes his mother could not bear to sort. He lay still until he heard her call his name, then pulled on his sneakers before she had to call again.
Sarah Harris was thirty-two years old, although the illness in her lungs had made her look older. A year earlier she had still been waiting tables at a highway diner, carrying plates in both hands and remembering the regulars' orders without writing them down. Now she sometimes needed a full minute to recover from walking from her chair to the bathroom. She hated the oxygen tubing most on the mornings when Toby looked at it, because she could see him calculating things no child should have to calculate.
"You should be sleeping," Sarah said as he appeared in the doorway. Her words came between careful breaths, but she managed a smile anyway. "It's summer vacation, and you're acting like the rooster died and left you in charge." Toby told her he liked getting up early, which was not entirely a lie, because the quiet hours gave him time to hide his worry.