Then I started playing the game. That's the thing about being taught something. Eventually you use it.
It was a Sunday. My mother was on the phone with her sister — twenty, thirty minutes of it, the kind of call that goes in the bedroom with the door shut. Riggs was in the garage sorting screws into little plastic tubs. And I walked in, stood there, and looked at the clock.
Then I put my hand flat on his back. He looked up at me. And I watched a fifty-five-year-old man's face change when he realized the order had flipped.
"Oh," he said.
"Uh huh."
"Odie—"
"Shhh." I put a finger on his mouth. His mouth. "Quiet."
I pushed him back against the workbench and got on my knees in the sawdust. That he wasn't ready for. Five months and he'd never once had it from me — it had always been bent-
