The Taillights We Fixed for Free

“I have been scared every day since you got your license,” he said to Tyler. “Every single day. Every time I hear a call come over the radio for a car in a ditch, I think it’s you. And I don’t know any way to be about that except hard. I thought if I was hard enough, you’d never end up like me.” He looked at the ground.

“So I towed your car. Over a taillight. That you’d already ordered the part for. With your girl sitting right there.”

Tyler’s face did not move at all, but his hand opened slowly, and the old bulb sat there in his palm.

“That’s not teaching,” Craig said. “That’s just me being scared out loud. I know it. The sheriff knows it too, he made sure of it.” He almost smiled. “And then I drove past here three times today and watched you fix half the town.”

I did not say anything. It was not my turn to say anything. Tyler looked at him a long time.

Then he said, “You still have to pay the ticket on this, you know.”

“What?”

“Equipment violation,” Tyler said. “Brake light out. Showing no red to the rear.”

For a second, Craig just stared at him. Then he laughed, a real laugh, the kind that comes up out of a man when he’s been holding his breath too long. He put his hand over his face.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“I paid mine,” Tyler said. “I didn’t want you to tear it up.”

Craig dropped his hand. He looked at Tyler like he was seeing him for the first time, this tall boy with grease to the elbows and a five-dollar scrape on his knuckles.

“I wouldn’t have,” he said. “That’s the one thing my dad did that I’m never going to do. I’d never tear up your ticket.” He shook his head. “Pay your own tickets. Fix your own lights. That’s all I wanted you to know. I just didn’t know how to say it.”

The Bell

Right then, the church bell started ringing.

I turned around. The bell tower door was open, and I could see Pastor Ron’s arm going up and down on the rope, up and down, his whole body leaning into it. The bell is from 1912. It is cast iron and you can hear it four miles out in the country on a still day.

It rang and it rang. People came out of the café across the street to look. A man on the corner took his cap off without knowing why.

Hailey was counting under her breath. I realized after a while that she was counting the rings. Sixty-two. Sixty-three. Her lips were moving.

Sixty-four.

And then it stopped, and the last note hung over the parking lot and the river and the whole little town, and went quiet.

Pastor Ron came out of the tower a minute later, red in the face and wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

“Told you you’d know the number,” he said to me.

I could not answer him. I had my hand over my mouth. Hailey’s mom was crying. Dale from the parts store was blowing his nose into a shop rag. Tyler was standing by the back of the squad car with his eyes shut, and Craig was standing next to him with his hat in his hand that he must have gotten from the seat without anybody seeing.