Delbert, it turned out, was the man on the Segway. He did not have the knight either, though he was very kind about it and had me fill out a form, under DESCRIPTION OF ITEM, on which I wrote White chess knight, boxwood, 1 1/2 inches, hand-carved, irreplaceable, and then crossed out irreplaceable because it seemed melodramatic, and then wrote it back in because it was true.
When we came out of the security office it was eleven-thirty and Truett was on his throne. The line had already started to form. He saw us from across the atrium and lifted a white-gloved hand, and then he saw our faces and his hand came down slowly.
"Let's get out of here," Oren said. "I'll buy you lunch. You can't be in a mall when you're sad. It's bad for you. All the lights are too bright."
We went across the skywalk to a diner on Main that has been there since the Expo, the kind with red vinyl booths and pie in a revolving case, and Oren ordered breakfast because for him it was dinner, and I ordered a grilled cheese and didn't eat it. He ate pancakes like a man shoveling coal into a furnace. When he had finished he sat back and looked at me, and I could see the exhaustion in him now, sitting behind his eyes like a second person.
"You should go home," I said. "You're going to fall over."
"In a minute." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. Go anyway, I guess. Bring the lug nut." I laughed, a little, without much in it. "Just show up empty-handed and say, I made you something, but I lost it. That's very on brand for me, actually. I'm the sister who loses the knight."
"You could tell him that."
"That I lost it?"
"That you made it." He shrugged. "Eleven months on Tuesday nights with the owl lady. That's not nothing. You could tell him you made it and lost it, and that you're going to make another one. People don't need the thing, usually. They need to know you tried to make the thing."
"Is that what they teach you in respiratory therapy school?"
"No. That's what my ex-wife told me when she left." He said it plainly, without any self-pity. "Meredith. We were married six years. I worked nights the whole time. I was always the guy who'd pick up the extra shift, cover for somebody whose kid was sick, come in during the ice storm when nobody else could make it up the hill. I was really, really good at showing up for everybody who wasn't her. And when she tried to show up for me, I'd say I was fine. She made me dinner, I said I'd already eaten at the hospital. She planned a trip, I said I couldn't get the time off. I thought I was being low maintenance. I thought that was a gift." He turned the cup again. "She said it was like being married to a very polite wall. She said she would rather I had dropped the ball a hundred times than never once let her catch it."
I didn't say anything. Outside the window it had begun to snow again, small dry flakes ticking against the glass.