They put him in a room that smelled like floor cleaner and somebody else's flowers. Room 214. I remember the number because I said it to myself the whole way, like if I got it wrong they'd send me back out.
Dutch walked me in. He didn't knock. Men like Dutch don't knock on doors they consider theirs.
Hammer was awake. That was the first surprise. I'd pictured tubes and machines and a man mostly gone. Instead he was sitting against the pillows with his leg in a frame of pins and hardware, ribs taped under the gown, a cup of ice chips in one hand like a man holding a drink at a bar. His face was the color of newspaper. But his eyes were clear, and they found me the second I came through the door.
"Well," he said. "The angel has a face."
"I'm not an angel," I said. "I'm the night girl at the Starlite. You're lucky I hate an empty diner."
He laughed, and it cost him. He pressed one hand flat against his taped ribs and waited for the pain to finish what it had to say. "Sit down, kid. Standing there like you're going to run."
I sat. The chair was vinyl and it stuck. Rita was there too — I hadn't seen her at first, she was in the corner by the window with a paperback on her knee, watching me the way you'd watch weather come over a ridge. She nodded once. I nodded back. That was our introduction and it was enough for both of us.
A nurse came in, checked the line in his arm, wrote something on the chart at the foot of the bed, and left. Nobody asked who I was. In that room, apparently, I was already explained.
"You pulled me out of a ditch," Hammer said, when the nurse was gone.
"I pulled your door open," I said. "The rest you mostly did yourself, complaining the whole way."
"I complain when I'm dying. It's how Rita knows to worry. When I go quiet, that's the time." He set the cup down, like the tray table was a card table and he didn't want to spill the hand. "You know what I keep thinking about, in here? Mile marker 114. I've ridden that road four hundred times. And I've been pulled off it exactly twice in my life, both times by the same family."
I didn't say anything. The machine beside him counted his heart out loud.
"2004," he said. "September. I was forty-one years old and bulletproof, or I thought so. Came around a bend outside of Livingston on a bike I'd built myself, and a drunk in a cattle truck crossed the center line and put me in the ditch with the bike on top of me, and the bike was burning. Not big. Just starting. Just starting is enough when you're pinned under two hundred pounds of hot metal and your leg's pointing the wrong direction."
"Don't," Rita said from the corner, not looking up. "You do the leg direction part every time."
"Because it's the part that matters." He looked at me again. "A tow truck stopped. Nobody stopped, not for a biker, not at night. But this one stopped. Young guy, couldn't have been thirty. He dragged that bike off me with his hands wrapped in his own shirt to keep from burning his palms. Then he dragged me clear. Then he sat down in the ditch with me — sat down, in the dirt, in the dark — and talked to me for forty minutes until the ambulance came, so I wouldn't go to sleep. Told me about his baby girl. Told me her name was a bird."
The room went quiet. Rita had closed her book.
"His name was Tom Halloway," Hammer said. "And I've been looking for a way to pay that man back for twenty years. Then last spring I heard he'd died, and I thought the debt died with him. It didn't. It was waiting at mile marker 114 in a diner uniform."
I stood up. I don't remember deciding to. The chair scraped. "You knew my father."
"I knew him twice," he said. "Once in a ditch, and once the next year, when he came to find me with a box. But that's tomorrow's story, and the doctor says I have to sleep, and Rita's going to make me whether the doctor says it or not." He reached out — slow, because everything on him was slow — and closed his hand around my wrist. His grip was warm, not weak. "Listen to me, Wren Halloway. I owe your family a debt with interest. Twenty years of interest. And I pay my debts. That's the sermon. Go eat something. Dutch knows where."
I walked out of Room 214 with my childhood rearranged, and the snow coming down like the world hadn't noticed anything had changed.
Chapter 7: The Name She Buried