His father would have been twenty-four years old in 1979.
Kyle shut the laptop. Then he opened it again, and looked at the name again, as if it might have changed.
* * *
He drove out to his father's house on Saturday morning with a box of doughnuts from the place on Lincoln, the way he did most Saturdays when he was not working. Ray was in the garage, as he usually was, bent over a self-propelled Toro with the spark plug out and a radio on the workbench murmuring the pregame show. The garage smelled of two-stroke oil and cut grass and old cardboard. On the back wall, above the pegboard, the original sign from the car lot still hung where it had hung for thirty-five years: BRANDT AUTO SALES in red script on white sheet metal, the paint crazed and flaking, QUALITY USED CARS SINCE 1961.
"There he is," Ray said. "Officer Friendly. You bring the crullers?"
"I brought the crullers."
They ate the crullers standing up at the workbench while his father talked about the Toro and the starting pitcher. Then Kyle said, "Dad. Do you remember a car you sold in 1979? A green Buick Skylark. To a man named Walter Whitfield."
His father kept chewing. He did not answer right away. He wiped his fingers on a shop rag, carefully, one at a time.
"Why are you asking me that?"
"Because I stopped that car on Monday night. At the airport. His daughter was driving it. She's an airline captain." Kyle made himself say the next part. "And there's still a stolen report on it. From you. From 1979. Nobody ever cleared it. It came up when I ran the VIN."
The radio went on murmuring. Somewhere down the street a dog was barking at a mail truck. Ray Brandt folded the shop rag into a small square and set it down on the workbench next to the doughnut box, and when he looked up at his son, his face had gone old in a way Kyle had never seen it go before.
"Huh," he said. "Huh. Well. Isn't that something."