Free Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

minute. “Well,” he said finally.
    “What?”
    Fix shook his head. “He was dead.”
    “What about the other guy, the service-station guy?”
    “He made it maybe an hour, long enough to get him into surgery.He died in surgery. He was a high school kid, summer job. All he had to do was make the coffee and keep the gas station open.”
    Patsy came back with two Styrofoam cups of water, each with a bent-neck straw. “You never think you want any until you see it. That’s the way it goes around here.”
    Franny thanked her and took the cups. Patsy was right, she wanted the water.
    “But that’s crazy,” Franny said to her father, though she remembered that this was part of the story her mother had told them in the car, that her father had gone crazy after his partner was shot, that he hadn’t been able to identify the man who killed Lomer. “How did Mercado get out of the police station? How did he know where you were?”
    “It was a quirk of the brain, or at least that’s how they explained it to me later. Too much had happened and somehow I mixed up the slides, exchanged one suspect for another. But to this day I’ll tell you: I saw what I saw. This was my partner dead. I didn’t know how it happened but the guy was standing under a light maybe fifteen feet in front of me. We looked straight at one another, just like you’re looking at me. When the cops came to the scene I described him to the letter. Hell, I gave them his name. But Jorge Mercado was in a holding cell in Rampart. He’d been there all night.”
    “And the guy who killed Lomer?” Franny said.
    “Turns out I never saw him.”
    “So they never found the person who did it?”
    Fix bent down the neck of the straw and drank. It was hard for him to drink because of the strictures in his esophagus. The water went down in quarter teaspoons. “No,” he said finally, “they found him. They put it together.”
    “But you identified another man.”
    “I identified another man to the police. I didn’t identify anotherman to a jury. They found someone who’d seen a car driving crazy near the gas station. They made it a point to find the driver and then they made it a point to find the gun he’d thrown out the window of the car. You shoot a kid in a gas station and the police department will make a sincere effort to find you. You shoot a cop in a gas station, that’s a different story.”
    “But they didn’t have a witness,” Franny said.
    “I was the witness.”
    “But you just said you didn’t see the guy.”
    Fix held up a single finger between them. “To this day I haven’t seen him. Even when I was sitting across from him in court. It never straightened out. The psychiatrist said when I saw the guy I’d remember him, and when I didn’t remember him the psychiatrist said it might come back over time, that I might just wake up one day and it would all be there.” He shrugged. “That didn’t happen.”
    “So how were you a witness?”
    “They told me who the guy was and I said yes, that’s him.” Fix gave his daughter a tired smile. “Don’t worry about it. He was the right guy. What you’ve got to remember is that he saw me too. He looked out of the fish tank just before he tried to shoot me. He knew who I was. He killed Lomer and he killed the kid and he knew I was the guy who saw him do it.” Fix shook his head. “I wish I could remember that kid’s name. At the funeral home his mother told me he was a serious swimmer. ‘Very promising’ is what she said. Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”
    Beverly had stayed for another two years after Lomer died, even though she’d already made a promise to Bert that she was leaving. She stayed because Fix needed her. She’d pulled the car over to the side of the road on that day of the bad fight after school in Virginiaand told Caroline and Franny to stop thinking she had just walked out on their father because she