His face changes twice.First the recognition.Then the assessment—the cut, the jaw, the way I’m standing with my left arm doing more work than it should.The doctor before the man.His eyes do what doctors’ eyes do.Catalog.Diagnose.Reach.
“Jesus, Luke.What happened to you?”
“Nothing.”
“That cut needs closing.Let me?—”
“I said nothing.”
He stops.Pulls his hand back.The hand that was already reaching for my face the way it probably reaches for everything—automatically, instinctively, the reflex of a man who spent a decade fixing people and couldn’t stop himself from breaking one.
For a moment, neither of us moves.The pump clicks.Gas flows.The evening is doing something ordinary and indifferent above us and the world is just a gas station on a weekday and not the place where two men who destroyed each other’s lives are standing eight feet apart.
He tries again.Not the doctor this time.The man.
“Luke, I—can we talk?”
“We’re talking.”
“I mean—” He runs his hand through his hair.Thinner there too.“Karen saw your truck.On Ridgewood.She’s seen it a few times.”
Karen.His wife.The one who waves at neighbors and checks the mail and lives in a house with green shutters and a golden retriever named Sunny while my wife lives in a box in the ground.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.
“The Hendersons’ place.Under the oak.She described the truck.”He pauses.“She’s scared, Luke.”
“She’s scared.”
“She thinks—she doesn’t know what to think.She wants me to call the police.”
“So call them.”
He doesn’t expect that.I can see it—the recalculation, the flinch he tries to hide.He expected me to deny it.To back down.To be reasonable the way I was reasonable at the courthouse when I sat in a wooden chair and listened to a judge explain why the man who killed my family wasn’t going to prison.
“I don’t want to do that,” he says.Quieter now.“I don’t want to make this worse.”
“You can’t make this worse.”
“Luke—”
“You killed my wife.”I say it the way I’d saypass the salt.Flat.Factual.No heat.Heat is what people expect and I don’t give people what they expect.“You killed my son.You didn’t know your limits and you got behind the wheel and you crossed the center line and you took everything I had.And then you went home and got a dog and named it Sunny.So don’t stand there and tell me Karen’s scared.Karen’s alive.That’s more than you can say for Emily.”
The gas station is quiet.A truck passes on Route 9.The pump clicks off behind him.
Matthews looks at his shoes.He does that—I remember from the trial.When the weight gets too heavy he looks down.Like gravity will help him carry it.
“I’m sorry,” he says.First time.First time from his mouth and not a lawyer’s.
“My family is still dead.Regardless of how you feel.”
“I think about it every day.”
“So do I.The difference is you get to stop.”
He stands there.I stand here.Two men at a gas station with a dead woman between them and nothing left to say that would change a single thing.Blood is still running down the side of my face.He’s still looking at it.Still wanting to fix it.I’d rather bleed out on this concrete than let his hands touch me.
“Stay off Ridgewood,” he says.Not a threat.A request.The kind you make when you know you don’t have the right to make it but you’re making it anyway because your wife is scared and your daughter is six and the man parked under your oak tree has hands that know how to break things.
