"Three is more than none," Hollis said.
Toby came out behind her. He looked smaller than he had an hour ago and, somehow, older. He walked across the kitchen and stood in front of Hollis and looked up at him.
"I told her about you too," he said. "I said there was a man named Hollis who was helping. I hope that's okay."
"That's okay."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Why are you helping?" Toby said. "You don't even live here."
Ferris stopped pouring coffee. Bev stopped swinging her boots. Renée looked at him over her son's head.
Hollis could have said a lot of things. He could have said because it's right, which was true, and which was the kind of thing people say. He could have said because I'm a grown man and you're a kid, which was also true. He looked at the boy's face, and the gray eyes, and he thought about how much this child had carried by himself for four days, and he decided the boy had earned better than the kind of thing people say.
"When I was a lot younger than I am now," he said, "I was in a club. Not a good club. You saw the back of my vest. You know what kind."
Toby nodded.
"There was a man in Erie named Lonnie Pruitt," Hollis said. "He did some business with us, and then he got in trouble with the law, and the people I ran with thought he was going to tell the law about us. To save himself. Maybe he was. I don't know. I never found out." He kept his voice level. He had never said any of this out loud, not to his parole officer, not to the prison chaplain, not to the woman he'd lived with for six years after he got out. "One night in the winter, two of my brothers went to his house to talk to him. That's what they said. Talk. And I drove. I sat outside in the car with the engine running while they went in."
He could see it. He could always see it. The sleet. The orange light. The Buick's heater ticking.