“I guess,” he said.

“If Bob’s the one who hired you, why you coming to me with this?”

Arnie shrugged again. “The thing about Bob is, he thinks owning a bunch of used-car lots is on the same level as being the Pope or something. As big an asshole as you are, sometimes I think Bob’s an even bigger one.”

SYDNEY, SIXTEEN. A year ago.

She’s passed all her driving tests and now wants to take out the car solo. She has more opportunities at her mother’s house than at mine. Susanne works conventional hours compared to me, so there’s a car available more often for Syd to practice with in the evenings. When Syd’s staying with me, and there actually happens to be an evening when I’m home and the car’s in the driveway, I’m more hesitant about letting her take it out. I attribute this to the fact that I haven’t had as much chance to get comfortable with the idea of her being out there on the road, alone.

This is before she gets her summer job at the dealership, where she shows herself to be quite adept at getting into a strange car and whipping it around the lot, driving it into the service bay, lining it up over the hoist.

I’m driving a Civic this particular week. Sydney says she wants to drive it to her mother’s house to pick up some homework she’s left there, and drive back. On her own.

“Come on,” she says.

I give in.

About an hour later, there’s a knock at the door. I find Patty standing there, smiling nervously. She and Syd have been friends a couple of months now.

I open the door.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

“Syd’s not home,” I tell her. “She drove over to her mom’s to pick something up.”

“Can I still come in?”

I let her in.

“Okay, the first thing you have to know,” Patty says, holding her hands in front of her as though she were patting down a cloud, “is that Sydney’s okay.”

I feel the trapdoor opening beneath me. “Go on.”

“She’s fine. But this thing happened, and you need to know that it wasn’t her fault at all.”

“What’s happened, Patty?”

“On the way back from her mom’s, Sydney picked me up and we decided to go to Carvel for some ice cream?” It’s just down the hill from us. Patty must have walked up here from there. “So, she’s parked, and she’s not even in the car, and this guy, this total asshole, he’s driving some beat-up old shitbox, and he’s backing up, and he goes right into the car door.”

“You weren’t in the car? You and Syd?”

“Like I said, we saw the whole thing happen while we were getting our ice cream. And then the guy, he just takes off before we can get down a license plate or anything. But it was totally not Sydney’s fault.”

I started going for my coat.

“You’re not going to be mad at her, are you?” Patty asked.

“I just want to be sure she’s okay.”

“She’s cool. Mostly, she’s worried about you. That you’re going to freak out.”

Later, I say to Syd, “Is that what you thought I was going to do? Freak out?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Why’d you send Patty?”

“Well, she offered, first of all. And I kind of thought, okay, because, ever since you and Mom got divorced, well, even before you got divorced, every time there’s anything about money, it’s like, watch out, it’s freak-out time.”

“Syd-”

“And a dented door, that’s going to be a fortune, right? And you’re not going to want to put it through insurance because they’ll put your rates up, and, like, I’d pay for it but I don’t have any money anyway, and you’ll ask Mom for half but she’ll say it’s your car, you let me drive it, you should pay for it all, and you’ll get all pissed, and it’ll be like when you had the dealership and everything was going wrong and every night you and Mom were fighting and she said this was all supposed to give me a better life and it was like if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be fighting all the time and-”

The next day I ask Susanne to meet me for lunch.

“Truce,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. And, it turns out, she means it.

TWENTY-SEVEN

AFTER ARNIE LEFT, I called the cell number I had for Patty. First, I wanted to be sure she was okay, that she’d safely gotten home-or someplace-after she’d left my place the night before. She wasn’t answering. Probably saw my number and figured, drop dead, dickwad. I knew I’d been firm with her the night before, but there were probably others who’d accuse me of not being firm enough. Drinking underage, staying up late, not phoning home-there was plenty of material there for a lecture.

I didn’t feel that was my role, though. I’d felt an obligation to make sure Patty was okay, but it wasn’t up to me, certainly not at the moment, to turn her life around.

I had two numbers for Jeff. Home and cell. I called his home.

A woman answered. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Bluestein?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Tim Blake here.”

“Oh my, hello.”

I’d found that people who might normally ask how you were didn’t where I was concerned. I asked, “Is Jeff there?”

“Not at the moment. Is this about the website?”

“I had a couple of questions for him, technical stuff I really don’t understand.”

“Oh, I don’t get any of it, either. He’s always doing something on the computers, and I haven’t the foggiest notion what it is.”

“I’ve got his cell number. I’ll try that.” I hung up, dialed again.

“Yeah?”

“Jeff, it’s Mr. Blake.”

“Yeah?”

“We need to talk.”

“Yeah? I mean, yeah, sure, I guess. What’s up? Has the site gone down or something?”

“Nothing like that. I just wanted to talk to you about a couple of other things.”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing?”

“Huh?”

“Right now. What are you doing?”

“I’m on the train. Some friends and I decided to go into the city for the day.” By “city,” I guessed he meant Manhattan.

“You’re going into New York?”

“Yeah. Just something to do.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tonight, I guess,” he said. “We’re going down to SoHo to the Kid Robot store.” I had no idea what that was.

What I wanted to talk to him about I didn’t want to do over the phone. I didn’t know that his Dalrymple’s misadventure had anything to do with Syd, but I wanted to talk to him face-to-face when we went over this. Whatever intimidation skills I possessed might not work that well over the phone.

“Okay, we’ll talk tomorrow,” I said. “For sure.”

“For sure,” Jeff said, but he didn’t sound at all excited.

“YOU WANT TO BUY A CAR FROM ME,” Bob Janigan said that afternoon.

“Consider it my way of making amends,” I said.

The two of us were standing on the lot, pennants flapping overhead.

“It’s not true, by the way,” I said.

“What? You don’t want to buy a car?”

“I’m not trying to drive a wedge between you and Susanne,” I said. “I still care about her. I still love her, but not… the same way. And it’s not my intention to come between the two of you.”

“I think you’re full of shit,” Bob said.

I nodded, gave that a moment, then said, “So, what do you have?”

He pointed to a faded blue Volkswagen New Beetle, about ten years old, one of the first of the retro-designed models off the line. “What about that?”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“No, I’m not joking. It’s got relatively low miles, it’s priced fairly, and it’s pretty good on gas.”

“It’s a birthday car, isn’t it?” I asked.

Bob pretended not to know what I meant by that. It was what people in the business called a car that had been sitting on the lot so long it had been through an entire calendar year. “A birthday car?” he said.

“Come on, Bob,” I said. “I’ve noticed this car sitting here for months. You can’t unload it. There’s a puddle of oil under it, and the two front tires are bald.”

“It’s got tinted windows,” he said. “And there’s a six-pack CD player in the trunk.” He handed me a thick remote key. “Go ahead, start it up.”