He told him about fourth grade, in Hawesville, and reading out loud in a circle, and the word colonel, and the way everybody laughed, and the way the teacher laughed too, a little, before she stopped herself. He told him how after that he had made himself funny so that people would laugh at the things he chose. How he had been put in a class for a while, a slow class, with a woman who gave him sheets of letters to circle, and then the district lost the money for it and he was put back. How he had played point guard and been given C's by men who coached the team and taught history in the same building. How he had gotten through junior college on a girlfriend who read things to him, until she didn't. How he knew the Escape and the Explorer and the Bronco and the F-150 because he stood in the dark showroom at night listening to the modules on his phone over and over, a hundred times, two hundred, until he could have recited them in his sleep. How on paper the letters did not stay where you put them. How b and d traded places when he was tired, and 8 and B, and 2 and 5, and how he had known, writing the Dunaway VIN, that something was wrong with it, and had not been able to see what, and had handed it to Tavis anyway and made a joke.
"My mom thinks I'm a natural," he said. "She tells her sisters."
"You are a natural," Arvel said. "You just told me more about that car in ten minutes than I've learned about anything in a year. You made it so my wife won't be afraid of it. I could hear you doing it." He was quiet a moment. "That's a gift. But it's not a reason to stay where you are."
"I'm twenty-four."
"Starla was twenty-nine. The Methodist preacher was fifty-eight. I had a woman named Thelma Gaddis who was eighty-one, who wanted to read her own Bible before she died, and did." Arvel put his hand in the left pocket of the jacket, and Kade heard the soft rubbery snap of a band, and then the old man drew out a stack of index cards and held them in his lap without looking at them, since he could not. "I carry these around out of habit. I can't see them anymore. Haven't been able to since spring. I had to quit, Shawnda said, and she was right. Thirty-six years. I miss it like I'd miss my hand." He turned his head. "I'd have liked one more."
Kade looked at the cards. The top one had a word on it in square black capitals. He did not try to read it.