Chapter 12: The Ribbon

He shut the car door and backed down the drive.

His headlights swung across the garage, across all of us, and then he was gone.

Nobody said anything.

The recovery junior broke first.

"Can she do that? Patent somebody else's drawing?"

"She can try," Waylon said. "Whoever files first has the head start. Then you have to prove she took it."

"With what?" I said. "The notebooks are in Dallas. I never signed a page. I never dated anything."

I sat down on the step, hard.

Seven years of my life, and I couldn't prove a single day of it.

Gran looked at me.

Then she turned around, walked into the garage and climbed up on the workbench in her socks.

"Gran, get down."

"Hush."

She reached up to the wall above the pegboard, where there was a row of old photos held up with rusty thumbtacks.

Boats. Men holding fish. Gran in 1979 with a mullet and a wrench.

And me.

Fourteen years old, all elbows and braces, holding a cardboard rocket motor nearly as long as I was.

The vanes were cut out of a cereal box and painted silver.

The arrow was drawn on in marker.

A blue county-fair ribbon was pinned to my shirt.

I'd walked past that photo a thousand times.

Gran pulled out the thumbtack and climbed down.

She turned it over and held it under the shop light.

The back was stamped in faded purple ink by the drugstore that printed it.

A date. Five years ago, the July I spent at Gran's.

Under it, in Gran's square handwriting: Esme's Pinwheel. First place. Proud as hell.

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