Aiden looked away from Foster. “Changed the oil for you. Looked her over good. Other than the oil, she’s set to go.”

“Well I appreciate that. Hadn’t thought about the oil.”

Aiden nodded. “Yuht. People don’t.”

“I keep an eye on the water and tires.”

“Change that oil often enough, she’ll go forever.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Sorry to hear about your father.” Aiden looking away, off across the street.

“It’s all right,” Foster said. He lifted his wallet from his hip pocket. “How much for the oil and all?”

Aiden looked at him. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s no charge for that.” Foster looked back at him. “They don’t give that oil away.”

“That’s all right.”

Foster paused. Then said, “You mean a kindness I suppose.” He unfolded the wallet and took out a dollar bill and held it. “But Pop, he was a little more than a couple quarts of oil.” He let go of the bill then. It sailed out, rocking in a small sashay toward the ground.

In a narrow empty lunch counter he ate a hamburger sandwich and a slab of pie made from tinned cherries and drank coffee thick with cream and sugar. In a hardware he bought a new collar for Lovey. Her old one was pocked and frayed from where Glow would lie against her and chew on it. He thought maybe Glow was over that now. The new collar was beautiful. Double-stitched fine supple harness leather with a brass buckle, it lay in his hand limp and soft, the weight of it countering the pliability: a thing that would last. He bought gun oil and a chamois polishing leather.

Back on the street he paused and looked around him. The light aslant with early fall midafternoon shadow, everything delineated. He was distracted, buoyant, restless. Himself. He felt confident that he could meet all things head on and remain himself. He wanted the woods. He recalled what Connie Clifford had told him of Leah Pelham owning the world. And thought perhaps this certainty was some small click passing down to him from his grandmother. And smiled with this idea. As if she had survived all things to come to rest within him. Why not? was what he thought. He was sixteen years old and bold as a rivet bolting together a pair of steel plates.