His father was bent over the bench under the hanging shop light, with a VCR open in front of him like a patient on a table. That was what his father did. Lowell TV & VCR Repair, it said on the hand-painted sign nailed to the carport post, and underneath that, in smaller letters, All Makes, Fair Prices, House Calls. People brought him Zeniths and Magnavoxes and big wood-grain Sony consoles and he brought them back to life. Lately it was mostly VCRs. Everybody had one now, and everybody's kid had jammed a peanut butter sandwich into it.
He didn't look up. He had a jeweler's loupe screwed into one eye and a tiny screwdriver in his left hand. He was left-handed. So was Carter. That was one of the things Carter knew about his father. He made a mental list sometimes, lying in bed. Left-handed. Allergic to cats. Liked his coffee black and his eggs runny. Could fix anything with a wire in it. Didn't like baseball, which was weird, because he knew everything about it. Didn't talk about up north.
"Your mother's still asleep," his father said. "So keep it down when you go in."
"Okay."
His mother worked nights in the cardiac unit at TMC, seven to seven. In the summer that meant the house was quiet all day, the swamp cooler roaring and the curtains drawn and his father out here under the light. Carter had been raised by that hum.
He stood there, dripping on the concrete.
"Dad?"
"Mm."
"Do we have any family in Bisbee?"
He hadn't planned to ask it like that. He'd figured he would come at it sideways, the way you came at a dog you didn't know. She had said Warren was part of Bisbee, and he knew from the map in his social studies book that Bisbee was a copper town down near the Mexican border, and that it had a giant hole in the ground called the Lavender Pit that you could see from space, or at least from an airplane. He had looked it up once in the encyclopedia because of a filmstrip. Bisbee, Arizona. Population nine thousand. Elevation fifty-five hundred feet. Brewery Gulch.
His father's screwdriver stopped moving.
It didn't drop. That would have been too obvious. It just stopped, the way Mrs. Abbott's handkerchief had stopped, halfway to something. Then it started again, slow, turning a screw Carter was pretty sure was already all the way in.
"Bisbee," his father said. "Why would we have family in Bisbee?"
"I don't know. I met this lady."
"What lady?"