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driving that ratty minivan with the fake wood siding?”
    â€œIt’s got a windshield,” he said and took a slug of soda.
    I finished the stubs and handed back the pad. I took a similar pad from my jacket. “My son’s football team is having a summer raffle for new equipment. The Chevy dealer donated a Silverado Suburban. It’s a couple years old, but the tires come with it.”
    He laughed. “Hardin, you’re a pain in the ass,” he said. He took the pad, peeled out five tickets, and tore them off.
    I asked, “At what point did you delude yourself into thinking that you weren’t going to buy the church raffle tickets yourself?”
    He set the soda on my desk and leaned forward to fill out the stubs. “Some guys really sell these things.”
    â€œSure they do,” I said.
    â€œOne of the ushers already sold two hundred.”
    â€œDoes he fish or has he just got a gambling problem?”
    â€œI think he fishes.”
    I watched him fill out the stubs while I finished my soda. I crumpled my can and dropped it in the wastebasket at the end of my desk.
    â€œHey, there’s a deposit,” he said.
    â€œNot on those. I bought ’em down in Indiana when I went to get Wendy’s cigarettes.”
    â€œKay-ryst, Hardin! I come over here and you feed me bootleg soda?”
    â€œYou could always run me in.”
    He rolled his eyes up to look at me directly. “No,” he said. “I’m waiting for something good.”
    â€œYou busted me for murder once.”
    â€œThat was a hummer,” he said and flipped the pad back in front of me as he clicked his pen and put it away. “But it had its moments.” He smiled.
    Headlights flashed across the short window high on the back wall of my office.
    â€œThat’s probably my ride,” I said. Van Huis finished his soda and dropped the can into the wastebasket.
    I locked up, and we went out to the lot. We found my son Ben leaning against the front of his brother’s Camaro with his arms folded and one heel racked on the bumper.
    A month short of his seventeenth birthday, Ben stood six feet tall, was lean at the waist and wide at the shoulders. He wore a black denim jacket over white jeans and a black T-shirt. He had my brown eyes and—I told him—his mother’s hair. Far too long to suit me. Wendy liked it. When he was out with me he tied it in a ponytail and hid it under a baseball cap.
    â€œI would have donated my left testicle to science to have a car like that when I was a teenager,” said Van Huis.
    The Camaro was a black T-top with a four speed, Corvette rims and tires, and a sport suspension. Eye candy. Ben had turned off the ignition and Van Huis could not hear the part that I would have sacrificed significant appendages for—two-and-a-half-inch dual-exhaust pipes relieving a big block V-8 that loped like a three-legged dog until you cranked it on.
    â€œSo would I,” I said as I turned to look at Ben and told him, “and your brother would blow a gasket if he saw you sitting on it.”
    Ben made an embarrassed smile that included a roll of his eyes. He stood up, hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and walked over to look in my car. He had driven on a dawn-to-dusk “farm license” since he was fourteen. Working for local farmers, he’d piloted everything from harvesters to five-ton straight trucks. He proudly displayed his newly acquired “real driver’s license” to anyone who cared to look. But how Ben got out of the driveway in his brother’s car was a story I could hardly wait to hear.
    â€œHey, Pop,” he said, “you’re supposed to put that kind of stuff in the trunk.”
    â€œLet me get my flashlight,” said Van Huis. “Maybe they keyed the painttoo.” He reached into the open window of his minivan and extracted a flashlight that was a “two stroker” on the scale