After supper, Silas sat beside Toby on the porch steps and showed him a photograph he had found in an old album. Elias stood outside the Rusty Anchor's original workshop, younger and less severe than the man Toby knew from his mother's faded picture. He held a wrench in one hand and laughed at something outside the frame. Silas pointed to a crooked sign behind him and told Toby that Elias had painted it himself during a rainstorm because he hated wasting daylight.
"Did you love him?" Toby asked. Silas looked at the picture a long time. "Very much," he said.
"Not always in ways that were good for either of us. But yes." He handed the photograph over, and Toby studied it until the streetlights came on.
That night Toby placed the photograph beneath his pillow beside the pouch. He fell asleep thinking of two men called Elias and Richard, trying to understand how one father could have been so many things to so many people. From the kitchen, Sarah listened to the soft turning of pages as Silas helped him with the spelling assignment. It was the sound of an ordinary evening, and ordinary evenings were what Elias had wanted for them from the beginning.
The first rumor reached Toby's school on a Thursday. A boy in the sixth grade said he had seen Hells Angels motorcycles parked outside the Harris house, and another claimed Toby's uncle was the leader of every outlaw in California. By recess, the story had become something nobody involved recognized: Toby had been adopted by a gang, his mother had stolen money, and the motorcycles appeared whenever someone threatened him. Toby spent most of the afternoon pretending not to hear any of it.
During lunch a classmate named Evan Miller asked whether Toby could get somebody hurt. The question was spoken with the false casualness children sometimes use when they are testing how much power a rumor gives them. Toby set down his sandwich and said no. Evan leaned forward and asked why big motorcycles kept coming to his house if everybody there was so harmless.
"Because my uncle rides one," Toby answered. "That doesn't mean you get to make up stories about my family." Evan opened his mouth to say something else, but Mrs. Franklin was already walking toward their table. She had heard just enough to recognize that the conversation needed to end before it became a fight.
After school, she asked Toby to stay behind for a few minutes. She was a patient woman who had spent fifteen years teaching children whose families lived close to the edge of financial trouble. She knew Sarah had been ill and had noticed Toby arriving tired on more than one morning. Now she wanted to know whether the rumors reflected something genuinely frightening at home.