Every night, starting upstairs in the bedrooms, Brian closes the blinds before the moon comes out. A calendar with the day’s sunset hangs on the fridge. He tries to build in enough time to make it to every window, but this time of year requires extra diligence. The moon comes out before the sun’s gone, competing with daylight and winning out. Tonight, he finds the moon sitting in a glass pane above the kitchen sink. It’s shaped like a clipped fingernail that missed the bin, sailed across the room, and hung itself in the sky.

On the window ledge, a small photo of a boy in the driver seat of a car looks up at him. Brian looks past it at the splintered moon, thinking about the broken things he’s fixed. That he’s tried to fix. The cracked radiators, the worn valves, the people he stands across the hood from, listening. He pulls the cord, releasing the blind. Light from far away presses against the shade, trying to get in.

In the morning, a man pushes a black sedan up off the street into the lot. Brian opens the hood while the man tells him that he thinks it might’ve run its course, that he’d put over 200,000 miles on it. He says he’d gone to the pharmacy to pick up photos he had developed. He got back in the car, thumbed through the pictures, turned the key and nothing happened. The pharmacy is down the street, so he pushed the car straight here.

The sleeve of photos sits on the passenger seat. Brian asks the man about the pictures. The man picks them up, stands next to Brian and reveals scenes of a family reunion. Children playing catch, dogs rolling in grass, grandparents sitting in foldout chairs watching it all unfold. The man says this was just last week, that his family got together for the first time in ten years and how everyone had changed. The only person who was missing, he says, was his partner, a man he’d been with for about that time.

When he talks about Paul, he does so reverently, as if talking in church, as if Paul might come down from the sky. Brian walks around to the front end, looks over the engine, at the parts that make it move. They appear to him as a whole. He sees that without one, the whole would be lost and, really, the whole is all there is.

The man tells Brian that Paul refused to go. He wouldn’t stand next to a man who didn’t come outright with who he was. The man is from central Nebraska, about 150 miles from here. Out there, everyone looks toward horizons. Nobody has the nerve to look within. If they did, they’d see that the vastness around them didn’t compare to this—a space so wide and incomprehensible, they’d never be the same. So, the man did what he saw. He felt things and left them at that. He kept the part of him that most needed to be seen apart from the rest.

Brian checks the battery connector and the drive belt. He tells the man he’s sorry, that he hopes it works out. The engine looks fine, he says, nothing a few adjustments and fluids wouldn’t fix. Brian tells the man that he had one of these same cars. He brought his son home from the hospital in it then passed it down to him when he started driving.

Brian stops here where he usually does, ending with the image of a father and son in the front seat, the boy changing his first lane, dad checking mirrors. But the way the whole of the engine sits in front of him, how it all comes together—he goes on.

Brian tells the man that his son was driving on a county road out west. It was dusk, one of those dusty, early fall evenings, the time when deer run. One cut out of a field in front of the car, sending it off the road into a concrete pylon. The boy, he says, didn’t suffer, or so he was told, and so he tells himself. Brian says that out of everything that night, he remembers the moon. Big winds off the prairie, cicadas far off, a moon not quite whole. It was like someone had scrubbed at the edges with a cheap eraser. He could see the faded ink left behind. He could see what was missing, overshadowed by the brilliance of the rest.

In a far corner of the lot behind him, two barbed wire fences come together. Empty oil drums stack high and the remnants of a black sedan set there in a pile, the front end pushed into the back seat. The man tells Brian he’s sorry, that he can’t imagine.

Brian opens the driver door, puts the car in neutral. He walks to the back end, starts to push the car toward the garage. The man takes his place next to him. They get it moving, gaining momentum, until it goes along on its own, the two of them just following behind.



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