He looked at it for a long moment. Then he took it with both hands. He tried to put it on and couldn't, the hands wouldn't cooperate, and I stood there in the rain and did not help him, and he tried again, and got it on crooked, and left it.
"You should go back to your brother," he said.
"Probably."
"He's right, you know. About all of it. Whatever he told you. He's right."
"He didn't tell me much. Mostly he told me about himself." I sat down on the bench. Not next to him. There was an armrest between us, and I sat on the far side of it, and the cold of the metal came straight through my wet jeans. "He showed me the police report. The witness statement. The man who stopped. Lorne something."
"Lindemuth." He said it without hesitation. "He was a mail carrier. Off duty. He died in twenty eleven, I read it in the paper. I sent a card to his wife. I don't know if she knew who it was from."
"He said you got in the back seat with me."
Virgil Haberle didn't say anything.
"He said you held my face. And you kept saying look at me, not at him."
The bus shelter rattled in a gust. Water sheeted down the outside of the plexiglass and turned the street to a smear of red taillights and gray. He sat looking straight ahead through all that water, his jaw working a little, the way old men's jaws work, and when he talked his voice was very low and very steady, steadier than I had heard it all morning, and his hands on the cane were almost still.
"I don't tell that part," he said. "I want you to understand. I've never told anybody that part. Not my lawyer. Not my sponsor. Not the parole board. Your brother would tell you I'm making it sound better than it was. I'm not going to make it sound better than it was. It wasn't better than it was."
"Okay."
"I'd been drinking since noon. At the Polish Falcons on Parade Street. The game was on. I was driving home and I was going to stop at the beer distributor before it closed. That's what was in my head. That's all that was in my head. Getting there before they closed. I went through that light on Twelfth and I didn't even see it. I didn't see it was red. I don't remember it being any color. I just remember the side of your father's car, very close, very white, and then the sound. People think it's a bang. It's not a bang. It's a sound like the whole world tearing in half."
I sat very still.
"When I could move, I got out. I don't know how long. My head was bleeding. I couldn't see out of this eye." He touched the scar through his eyebrow. "I went around to your father's side. And I looked in. And I knew right away. I'd been in Korea, after the war, not in it, I was a kid, but I'd seen men. I knew. He was gone. He was gone before I got there." He stopped. "And then I heard you."