where the road bent toward home, until standing in the road taunting a boy who would not taunt back stopped being any fun.
After a while, Cody took his boot off the cart, told Arthur to enjoy his garbage, and the three of them climbed back into the truck and roared off toward town, leaving him in the settling dust. Arthur stood a moment breathing, then he picked up the handles and went on. By the time he got the safe up the outside stairs to his rented room above the hardware store, the light was nearly gone. The room was small, one window, and a bed and a table he had built himself from crate wood.
And the safe took up most of the floor when he finally rocked it off the cart and let it down with a thud that shook dust from the boards. He stood over it in the dimness, this thing he had given two years and every dollar he owned to hold. And for the first time since the auctioneer's hammer fell, he let himself feel how tired he was. Then he lit the oil lamp because the room had no electric light he could afford to run.
And he knelt down in front of his father's safe and got to work. The dial was the first problem. And a bad one. The fire had not just blackened the brass, it had reached inside the mechanism that the dial turned, and Arthur understood the moment he laid his fingers on it that the heat had done something cruel in there.
A safe's combination works through a stack of small wheels, each one notched, and when the right numbers bring all the notches into a line, a lever drops and the bolt is free to move. He had learned all of this in Walt's back room, taking apart the old practice locks again and again until the logic of them lived in his hands. But that logic assumed the wheels could turn cleanly. When he put his ear to the door and worked the dial, what he heard was not the small, clean music a good lock made.
It was a grinding, a dragging, the sound of metal that had melted just slightly and then cooled into a shape it was never meant to hold. The spindle, the central post the dial turned had warped. Not much. A craftsman's worth of nothing.