Page 174 of The Best Shot

“He makes things, too,” she said. “Not just fixes them.”

I looked up. “What kind of things?”

“There’s a job mechanics hate,” she said. “Something that takes two men half a day, and half the time you ruin the part getting it out. Hale built a tool for it.”

“Does it work?”

“It works.” Her mouth moved at one corner. “The man he partners with has thirty shops. Put it in every one. Now there’s a patent on it, and people who’ve never set foot in Texas keep calling the house.”

She reached into her bag and came out with a magazine, folded back on itself, and set it on the table beside the board.

“Somebody wrote about it,” she said. “There’s a picture of him leaning on a fender looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.”

I turned it toward me.

I read it twice. I don’t know that I got all of it. There were words for machines and measurements, but there was his name.

“It’s good when other people see it,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

She put her bishop somewhere it couldn’t help her.

“He’s been talking about traveling,” she said, like she was trying the idea out loud. “Seeing more than this place.”

“About time,” I said, and I wasn’t sure why.

“Yeah,” she grinned.

“Where?”

“The Serengeti. He wants to see the herds.”

“He stayed close for a long time,” she said, and glanced at me, then back at the pieces. “When he didn’t have to.”

I had a pawn in my hand. I put it back down where it came from.

“Sounds like a good man,” I said.

Her face softened. “He is.”

My bishop took her queen. She let it happen.

“You talk like you love him,” I said.

Her fingers stilled on the edge of the board.

“Yes,” she said, softer now. “I do.”

“That’s good.”

We finished the game. I won. Then we started another. She wasn’t much of a challenge, but in between moves she kept talking.

She told me about her work and the places she’d been. The South Pole came up like it was another planet she had briefly survived. Then there was a picture of her nephew, a brand-new, wrinkled face peeking out from blankets.

The image tugged at a memory I couldn’t quite catch.

“Can I ask you something?”