He hung up. Brandon got home at 6:40. Maylene was at the kitchen table with her notebook and a glass of water.
She looked up. She saw the bandana on his arm, the dirt on his jeans, the way he was favoring his right leg.
She set her pen down. Brandon. Caught on a fence on the way home, Grandma. It’s fine.
She looked at him for a long, slow moment. She did not believe him. He could see her not believing him.
But she was tired. The numbers in her notebook were wrong again. And he was home.
Sit down. Let me see it. He sat.
She unwrapped the bandana, looked at the bruise, cleaned it gently, rewrapped it with gauze from the medicine cabinet. The blue bandana she folded carefully and set on the table beside her notebook.
She didn’t ask again. He didn’t offer. That night, Brandon lay in his bed staring at the water stain on the ceiling.
His arm throbbed. His shoulder throbbed. Three words kept circling through his head over and over. We don’t forget. We don’t forget. We don’t forget.
By the next morning, three things had already started moving. Brandon didn’t know about any of them.
The first was a black SUV winding up a private road into the hills outside town. Wyatt Donovan was in the passenger seat.
Everyone called him Preacher. He was on the phone. He was not smiling. Yeah, he’s fine. Two cracked ribs, maybe. Won’t say. You know him.
No, some kid pulled him out. Black kid, 18, skinny, from the East Side. Yeah, I know. I know.
Hank wants the whole table at the shop tomorrow. Whole table. And bring the photographer. He hung up.
The SUV climbed the hill, past the gate, past the dogs. The second thing was happening downtown.
Linda Brennan, a reporter at the local news station, frowned at the voicemail on her desk phone. She listened to it twice.
Then she walked to the records room, pulled an old Manila folder from a low cabinet nobody had opened in years. The tab read, Callaway, Henry, Custom Cycles, 1995 to present.
