The Taillights We Fixed for Free

Craig

He pulled in slow and stopped at the end of the line, behind the minivan, and he sat there with the engine running for a minute. Tyler stood up from behind the Taurus. He looked at me. I looked at the squad car.

The minivan pulled away. The squad car rolled forward and stopped in front of us, and Craig put it in park. Nobody in the parking lot said a word. Dale stopped chewing. Hailey’s mom put her hand on Hailey’s shoulder.

Craig got out. He was in uniform, his tan shirt and his duty belt, his hat on the seat behind him. He stood by the door and looked at Tyler, and then at me, and then at the line of cars that had already gone, as if he could still see them there.

“My left brake light’s out,” he said. “On the squad. Sarge noticed it this morning.”

Tyler did not move.

“I was going to have the county garage do it Monday,” Craig said. “But I saw the sign.”

It was so quiet I could hear the flag rope clanking against the pole by the church door, steady as a clock.

Then Tyler walked around to the back of the Explorer. He opened the rear hatch and found the access panel, and I handed him a bulb from the box without being asked, because I had been handing him bulbs all day and my hand knew the size.

Craig stood at the side of the car and watched him work. Nobody said anything. Tyler pulled the socket, twisted out the old bulb, held it up to the light so Craig could see the broken filament, and put the new one in.

“Step on the brake,” Tyler said.

Craig got in and stepped on the brake. Both lights came on red.

“Sixty-four,” Hailey said quietly.

What Craig Said

Craig got back out of the car. He did not go to his door. He walked around to the back of the Explorer where Tyler was standing, and he stood in front of him, and I saw his jaw working the way men’s jaws work when they are trying to hold something in their mouths.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “And I owe your grandma two hundred and eighty dollars.”

Tyler did not say anything. He was holding the old bulb in his fist.

Craig took a breath. He looked over Tyler’s shoulder at the bell tower, and then he looked back at Tyler.

“My dad was a deputy in this county,” he said. “Twenty-six years. You probably heard that.”

“Yeah,” Tyler said.

“What you probably didn’t hear,” Craig said, “is that when I was seventeen I rolled my dad’s pickup into the ditch on County 10. I was going about seventy on gravel. I’d been drinking beer at a field party. My buddy Jeff Anderson was in the passenger seat, and he broke his pelvis in two places.”

I knew that name. Jeff Anderson walked with a cane. He ran the hardware store’s paint counter and he had walked with that cane since before I could remember. I had never once wondered why.

“My dad was the deputy who came out,” Craig said. “He wrote it up as a deer. He took me home. He never said one word to me about it, not that night, not ever. Nobody made me learn anything. Jeff spent three months in a hospital bed, and I went to the homecoming dance.”

His voice did not break. That is the thing I remember. It did not break, it just got smaller and smaller.