His father kept winding.
"Your mother told me about the step," he said. "That she told you. About the drive in '79."
"Yeah."
"Okay." Wind. Wind. "Okay."
Carter stood by the bench. The shop light buzzed. He had something in his pocket and he could feel it there, a small square heaviness, like a stone.
"Dad," he said. "Your dad died."
The pencil stopped.
"Three years ago. In 1983. In November. She said it was his heart. She said it was quick." He made himself keep going. "She said she would've told you. She didn't have anywhere to tell you."
His father didn't move. The tape hung slack between the reel and the machine. On the radio somebody was selling waterbeds.
Then he set the pencil down on the bench, very gently, as if it might roll away and he'd never find it again, and he turned on the stool and put both hands over his knees, and he sat there looking at the concrete floor of the carport, at a dark old oil stain shaped like Florida. He didn't cry. Carter almost wished he would. He just sat there and got older. You could watch it happen. It was like the time-lapse in the nature filmstrips, the flowers opening, except backward.
"November," his father said finally.
"Yeah."
"I was at a Sears in Phoenix in November of '83. At a training on the new Betamax II. Two days." He laughed, if that was a laugh. "Hundred and eighty miles."
"Dad." Carter took the thing out of his pocket. "She gave me this. She said she was going to give it to you herself, if you ever came. She said she'd waited this long and she could wait longer. But she said if you weren't going to come, then you ought to have it anyway. So I'm supposed to say that. That it's yours either way."
It was a wallet. Brown leather, old, worn shiny and curved at one end from riding for years in the back pocket of a man who sat on it. Carter held it out, and his father looked at it for a long time before he took it, and Carter knew he'd recognized it, because his hands knew how to open it without looking.