He knocked his fist twice on the table. Yes. You do.
At school, Ezra did not tell anyone. At recess he sat on the low wall by the basketball courts with his hood up and watched the custodian, Mr. Ebo, try to start the riding mower by the back fence. It cranked and cranked and didn't catch. Ezra could hear from where he sat that the engine was turning fine and it wasn't getting spark, probably the kill-switch wire under the seat, the one that tells the engine somebody's sitting down. Pop had shown him one on a mower from Kearney's.
He didn't get up. He sat on the wall and watched Mr. Ebo kick the tire and walk off to find somebody.
It was the first broken thing he had ever let stay broken on purpose, and it sat in his stomach all afternoon like a swallowed bolt.
VI.
Julian heard about the leave from Osvaldo Reyes, who ran prep and had run it for fourteen years, and who came into the shop at ten on Monday morning and stood next to Julian's lift with his arms folded and said, "You know they sent Yolanda home."
Julian put down his impact gun. "For what?"
Osvaldo told him. Osvaldo had the kind of voice that never went up, only down, and by the end of it, it was very low.
"He's saying the kid did something to the car."
"He's saying he has to look into whether the kid did something to the car." Osvaldo shrugged, one shoulder. "Same thing, where I come from."
Julian stood under the lift for a minute after Osvaldo left. Above him a Flying Spur hung on the arms with its wheels off, patient as a sleeping horse.
What he felt was not just anger, though there was anger. It was something closer to what he'd felt the day his ex-wife told him, very calmly, in a marriage counselor's office that smelled like cinnamon candles, that the trouble with him was that he always knew the right thing about four days after it would have helped. He'd stood in the showroom on Thursday with the end of a sentence in his mouth and let a woman and her son walk out the front door. Now the sentence had grown teeth.
But he was also, and he was not proud of this, a diagnostician. You did not walk into a meeting with a regional vice president on the strength of a feeling. Kessler had asked a question — a low, ugly question, but a question — and the only way Julian knew to answer a question was to go find the data.