Instead I turned toward the porch.
[“Hollis. Come here a second.”]
He came down off that step like a man walking into something.
And I took the keys off Wade’s palm — I did take them, I want to be accurate about that — and I turned round and I put them into Hollis Brandt’s hand and closed his fingers over them.
And I said: “You hold these. I’ll ask you when I want them.”
And I want to explain why that was the right sentence, because I did not plan one word of it and I have had thirteen years to work out what I did.
I did not refuse the car.
Refusing it would have been a scene, and Wade was extremely good at scenes. He would have driven home with a story about an ungrateful kid and he would have told it for a decade and it would have worked.
And I did not say “it’s yours, Hollis,” because it wasn’t, and everybody in that driveway would have known it wasn’t.
I gave him the authority.
Which is the one thing Wade had come for.
He had not come to give me a car. He had come to be the man who decides. And I took that, on a driveway, at seventeen, and handed it to somebody else in front of him.
And Wade laughed.
He did. He stood there and laughed, and he said: “All right. That’s a new one.”
And then he said to my mother — not to me — “Let me know when he grows up.”
And he got in his hire car and went.
Ollie was eleven and he asked me about four times that night whether I was going to be allowed to drive it.
And I want to describe the next four minutes, because everybody who hears this assumes the driveway emptied straight away and it did not.
Nobody moved for a bit.
