He did not say anything for a while after that. He stood with his hand on the roof of the car and looked at the dash, and Selma stood on the pump island and looked at him, and the young man by the pickup truck looked at both of them with an expression of total and courteous bewilderment, like a person who has walked into the wrong room at a funeral home and been too polite to leave.
Selma took out her phone. Five-twenty. She typed a message to Coach Villalobos with her thumb, quickly, before she could think too hard about it: So sorry, running late, will be there by 6:20 at the latest, please tell Kenan I'm coming. She hesitated over the last part and then added: Please tell him it's not his fault. She sent it. Then she looked across the island at the young man.
"Thank you," she said. "I think it's all right now."
He looked at the sergeant, and at her, and at the car. "You sure?"
"I'm sure. Thank you for staying. Really."
He nodded slowly. He did not look sure. He got into the white pickup and started it, and then he sat there with the engine running for a long minute with his window down, and only when the sergeant took his hand off the roof of the Mercedes and stepped back and leaned against the pump island's steel bollard, heavily, like a man leaning on a fence at the end of a long day, did the young man put the truck in gear and pull out onto Gravois, the trailer rattling behind him, the empty leaf bags lifting in the bed. Under the overhang the girl in the QuikTrip shirt watched him go and then looked back at Selma, and Selma raised a hand to her, a small wave, I'm all right, and after a moment the girl went back inside.
"There's a bench," Selma said. "By the air pump. You should sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're gray. Sit down, please. You're making me nervous."
He looked at her as if to argue, and then he did not argue. He went to the bench by the air pump, which was a steel bench bolted to the concrete with a QuikTrip logo cut into the backrest, and he sat on it, slowly, with his knees apart and his forearms on his thighs and his hands hanging between them. The radio on his shoulder made a sound, a burst of static and a dispatcher's voice saying a car number and an address on Chippewa, a disturbance, and somebody else's voice answering, and he did not move to touch it. Selma stood by the car. She did not sit on the bench. She left the driver's door open.
"Nineteen eighty-nine," he said, to his hands. "He bought it off a dentist in Webster Groves. Dr. Feltman. Saw it in the Post-Dispatch classifieds on a Sunday and drove out there on the bus because my mother wouldn't drive him, she was so mad, and he came home in it. I was seventeen. I came out on the porch and there's this— this boat in the driveway. This cream-colored German boat. And my old man in it with the window down, grinning like a kid." He shook his head. "He'd never owned anything nice in his whole life. He grew up on Arsenal Street in a flat with no hot water. He walked a route in Dutchtown for thirty-four years. Rain, snow, all of it. Bad knees by forty. And he used to see these old Mercedes diesels on his route, there was a guy on Itaska had one, a guy on Delor— and he used to say, those things'll run a million miles, Gene. A man buys one of those, he's done buying cars. That was the whole reason. He wanted to be done buying cars."