"Was your brother a bad man?" Toby finally asked. Silas kept his eyes on the road. He could have said yes, or no, or nothing, and each answer would have been dishonest in its own way. "He did some bad things," he said. "He also did some good things, and I loved him before I knew the difference."
Toby considered that. His mother had never called Richard bad, and the idea that a person could be both frightened and loved made an uneasy kind of sense. "Mom says he fixed cars," the boy said. "He used to make his own tools if he couldn't buy the right one."
Silas looked down at the scar near his thumb, received one winter while helping Elias repair a motorcycle in an unheated shed. "That's true," he answered. "Your father could hear a problem in an engine before anybody else knew one was there. When we were kids, he'd take broken clocks apart and put them back together with pieces left over, and somehow they'd still keep time."
"The pocket watch doesn't," Toby said. Silas smiled faintly, his first real smile since entering the bar. "Then maybe it has a story of its own," he replied, and for the next few minutes that small statement gave Toby something safer to think about than the two motorcycles behind them.
Their street was a dead end lined with modest houses, most built when Bakersfield still felt smaller than it did in 1988. A neighbor watering roses stood motionless as the Silverado came to a stop, and two curtains shifted in the house across from Sarah's. Silas noticed the watching faces and instructed Bones and Mickey to stay outside. "No crowd on her doorstep," he said. "She doesn't need another reason to be afraid."
Toby hurried up the cracked path and pushed through the front door, which still needed the lock repaired. Inside, the oxygen concentrator hissed beside the armchair, and the smell of chicken soup hung over furniture that had been cleaned too often in the hope of making the house feel less like a sickroom. Sarah had pulled a cardigan over her nightdress and brushed her hair, small acts of composure that had plainly exhausted her. She looked first at Toby, making certain he was whole, then at Silas standing in the doorway.
For a moment, her face emptied of expression. Silas had changed since the summer she remembered, but the resemblance was unmistakable in the angle of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, and the way he held his shoulders when he was preparing to hear something unpleasant. She gripped the chair arms and tried to stand. Toby rushed to her side, and Silas lifted a hand to stop her.
"Please don't get up," he said. "I'm not here to make you do anything." Sarah sank back into the cushions, one hand resting on Toby's hair, and stared at the lighter Silas placed on the coffee table. Her mouth moved once without producing a sound.
"I thought I'd never see that again," she whispered. Toby glanced up at her, startled. "You knew about it?" he asked. She nodded slowly, still staring at the tarnished silver. "Your father used to keep it in his shirt pocket, close to his heart. Even after he stopped smoking, he carried it because somebody he loved had given it to him."