Gene looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at the dent in the rear door, and then he bent forward on the bench and put his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook.
Selma stood by the car and let him. She looked away to give him the dignity of it, across the lot at the store, at the reflection of the sky going orange in the big front windows, at a woman with a stroller coming out with a fountain drink. She thought of her father kneeling on the linoleum of the hostel in Bad Cannstatt with his hands on his knees, waiting for her to come out from behind her mother. She thought of him at the bench in the second bay with the jeweler's screwdriver, measuring. She thought about how a man could keep a thing safe for thirteen years for a stranger, and how the stranger could spend sixteen years looking for it, and how they could have passed each other on Gravois a hundred times, the cream car going one way and the white police car going the other, and how it had taken a sergeant laughing at her at a gas pump to bring them together, and she did not know what she thought about that, about God's sense of humor, except that it was very strange and very old and did not ask anybody's permission.
When he had stopped, she went to the car and leaned across the driver's seat and opened the glovebox. She took out the plastic sleeve with the papers, and under it, where it had always been, the small paper envelope from a hardware store, with the jeweler's screwdriver inside. She brought them both over to the bench and held out the envelope first.
"What's this."
"It's a screwdriver," she said. "He kept it in there. For the medal. So that if you came, he could give it back to you quickly, and you wouldn't have to wait."
Gene did not take it. He looked at it in her hand.
"He wrote to the insurance company," Selma said. "In 2011. I checked his spelling. He told them he had found something of religious and personal value that belonged to the prior owner and he wanted to return it. They wrote back that they would forward his letter to the last address they had." She held his eyes. "Maybe it went to the house."
His face did something complicated. "Maybe," he said.
"He waited for you. Not— I don't mean he sat by the window. But he talked about you. He didn't know your name, so he said they. Maybe they come today. On Saturdays when he polished the car. Maybe today they come, Selma, look, I clean it for them." She heard her voice go unsteady and let it. "It was a joke, after a while. But it wasn't only a joke."
"He was Muslim," Gene said. "Your dad."
"Yes."