Tyler finished his automotive program two years later.

He graduated near the top of his class, which surprised no one who had watched him in a garage, and by then he was working at a restoration shop in Charlotte that specialized in American muscle cars. It was a clean, serious place, with a polished concrete floor and a wall of vintage license plates, owned by a gruff, round-bellied man named Earl Dwyer, who had hired Tyler after watching him rebuild a carburetor in under an hour. He communicated mostly through grunts and the occasional wrench pointed at a problem. Tyler adored him.

He drove up to Ridgecrest on weekends, sometimes, in a pickup with a bad muffler, to help Walter with the Camaro.

Earl once told him, in a rare burst of eloquence, that a man’s hands could not lie about his character, and then went back to grunting.

They had settled into an unspoken arrangement. Walter did not ask Tyler to come, and Tyler did not ask whether he was welcome. He simply appeared on certain Saturdays with a thermos of coffee and a bag of doughnuts, and Walter would look up from under the hood and say, “You’re late,” though he never said what for. They worked side by side, usually in silence, passing tools and nodding. Occasionally Tyler asked a question. Occasionally Walter answered.

It was comfortable in a way neither would have named.

The first time Walter allowed Tyler to drive the car happened almost by accident.

They had spent a long Saturday replacing a clutch linkage, a stubborn, knuckle-scraping job that required four hours, two borrowed tools, and a good deal of language Walter would not have used in front of Elaine. By the time they finished, the afternoon had gone amber, and both men were covered in grease and quietly pleased with themselves.

Walter wiped his hands on a rag. He looked at the finished work. He looked at Tyler, who was crouched beside the pedal assembly with a flashlight, checking the travel one more time with careful fingers.

Then he took the keys from his pocket and tossed them across the garage.

Tyler caught them, reflexively, and then froze, holding them in both hands like something alive.

“You serious?” he asked.

“Do I look like I enjoy jokes?”

“About this car?”

“No.”

Tyler stared at the keys. They were old keys, worn at the edges, hanging from a small leather fob that Elaine had stitched herself. He turned them over in his palm. For a moment he seemed unable to speak.

Walter pointed toward the street. “Ten miles.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No highway.”

“No.”

“No showing off.”

“No.”

“And no pretending it belongs to you.”

Tyler laughed, and the laugh was shaky. “Understood.”

Walter climbed into the passenger seat, which smelled of old leather and faint gasoline and, very faintly, of a perfume that had not been worn in years. He had not sat in that seat since Elaine died. It felt narrower than he remembered. He settled in anyway and fastened the belt, and Tyler slid behind the wheel and sat with his hands at ten and two, looking straight ahead like a student driver.

He turned the key.

The engine caught with a deep, rolling growl that filled the garage and shivered the tools on the pegboard. The sound rose, steadied, and settled into a low, rumbling idle that Walter felt in his ribs. For a second he thought about Elaine. She would have approved. Probably after giving him a lecture about insurance.

“Go on,” he said.

Tyler eased the car out of the garage, backed down the driveway with exaggerated caution, and turned onto the street. He drove carefully. Painfully carefully. He kept both hands rigid on the wheel and shifted as gently as a man handing over an infant. The Camaro moved through the quiet streets of Ridgecrest like a black ship through still water, and the neighbors on their porches turned their heads to watch it pass.

“You can use third gear,” Walter said finally.

“I’m trying not to die.”

“You’re going thirty-two.”

“It’s your Camaro.”

Walter smiled. He looked out the window at the familiar houses sliding by, at the lawns and the sprinklers and the long gold light on the road.

“That’s right,” he said.

They drove twenty-seven miles. The ten had become twenty, and then somehow twenty-seven, winding out past the pillars and along a country road shaded by pines, and Walter pretended not to notice. He did not say a word about it. He only watched the road unspool, and listened to the engine, and let the afternoon go on being what it was.

When they finally pulled into the driveway, Tyler shut off the engine and sat very still. His hands were shaking slightly on the wheel. He did not look at Walter.

“Thank you,” he said, quietly.

“It’s a car,” Walter said.

“It’s not.”

Walter did not argue. He opened the door and stepped out into the warm, ticking silence, and he stood for a moment with one hand resting on the roof.