boxes, with the radio murmuring a late-night call-in show from Cleveland. When I woke up it was getting light outside, gray and pink over the rooftops of East Broad, and Hutch was standing by the Corvette with a work light, slowly walking the beam across the door at a low angle, the way you do to look for flaws.
I got up and stood beside him. You could see it, if you knew where to look, and if you held the light just so: the faintest difference in the way the red took the light, a ghost of a line no longer than my finger. If you didn't know, you would never know.
"Well," said Hutch, "it's not factory." He turned off the light. "But it's honest."
Win drove the Corvette out of the bay at six-forty on Wednesday morning with the door panel back on and the top down and the sun coming up. He did not wave. He just looked at us once, Dennis and me standing in the alley in our resin-stiff clothes, and nodded, and drove.
I did not see what happened at the Chevy place that morning. I only know it the way the rest of Elyria knew it, in pieces, and the pieces I trust came from Win himself, much later, sitting on the hood of a car that was not a Corvette.
He told his father everything. He told him in the kitchen of the house on Washington Avenue at seven-fifteen, standing up, with the Corvette in the driveway and the auditor coming at eight. He told him about cutting the line and the five-dollar bill and what he had said about my father. He told him he had lied to the police and lied to his father, both, and that a boy from Furnace Street had broken his hand over it and lost the best job anybody on that street had ever been offered. He told him about Hutch's bay and the three nights and the hundred and ninety-four dollars, and that sixty of it had come out of a Band-Aid tin that was supposed to buy a Dart for a nurse's aide who walked to work. And he told his father that he would not drive the flag anymore, not on Saturdays and not on any other day, and that if the fort was on fire, he would rather help put it out than drive around town pretending it wasn't.
Royal Conway, Win said, did not say anything for a long time. He sat at the kitchen table in his shirt and tie with the GMAC letter in front of him, and he looked out the window at the Corvette in the driveway, and then he got up and went out and walked around it once in his good shoes, and crouched by the door, and ran his thumb along the place where the crack had been.