"Are you safe?" she asked him. Toby thought about the question longer than she expected. He had been frightened in the Rusty Anchor, frightened when the motorcycles followed the truck, and frightened when his mother coughed through the night. But he did not feel unsafe with Silas, and he did not know how to fit both truths into one answer.
"I think so," he said finally. "My uncle can look scary, but he doesn't make me do scary things. My mother told him he has to ask before coming over, and he does." Mrs. Franklin nodded. It was not everything she wanted to know, but it was an answer she could work with.
She called Sarah later that afternoon and explained the situation without assuming Toby had done anything wrong. Sarah listened, her embarrassment rising as she pictured what other parents might be saying. The years she had spent hiding Elias's identity had been meant to protect her son from precisely this kind of attention. Now the secret had found its way into a school lunchroom, where it had become something children could throw at one another without understanding its weight.
Silas heard about the rumors over dinner on Saturday. He sat with his fork suspended above a plate of beans while Toby described Evan's question. His expression darkened, and for an instant Sarah saw the old version of him returning: the man who believed problems were solved by making people afraid. She put down her own fork before he could speak.
"Don't even think about going to that school," she said. Silas blinked, then looked away with a guilty little smile. "I didn't say I would," he answered. "You didn't have to. I know that look. Toby doesn't need a parade of motorcycles to prove his family is respectable."
Silas set his fork down. "You're right," he admitted.
Then he turned to Toby. "When somebody asks you about me, you can tell them what you know, and you can tell them to mind their own business. If it gets worse, talk to Mrs. Franklin or your mother. I am not going to teach you that the answer to being scared is making somebody else more scared."
Toby looked surprised. Until recently, he had assumed men who wore leather vests always answered insults with shouting. Silas was learning that the boy noticed every contradiction between his promises and his actions. He had also begun to understand that becoming an uncle was a slower form of courage than any fight he remembered.
A week later, Silas took Toby to see a clock repairer named Mr. Leon Adler, who operated out of a narrow storefront near the old part of downtown Bakersfield. The windows were crowded with clocks of every size, and the air held the smell of oil, varnish, and dust. Mr. Adler was a small man with a magnifying lens that hung from a cord around his neck. He accepted the stopped pocket watch as though Toby had brought him a wounded animal.
"It belonged to my father," Toby explained. "We think it hasn't worked for a long time." Mr. Adler opened the back carefully and examined the movement beneath a lamp. After several minutes he said the watch had suffered a damaged balance assembly and would require delicate work, perhaps a replacement part that was difficult to find. He did not promise success, but he did promise not to rush.