My boy Carson has killed a girl. Not the way you think. Not by his own hand. But there’s more than a good many setting blame upon the shoulders of a man who declared himself in love with a girl who’s shot herself.
You don’t very often hear about a girl using a gun that way. It’s a man’s way of finishing things, erasing the world with certainty. But here’s proof of the otherwise in this girl dead on the spot. Though there’s those that say at eighteen a woman is what she’s to be called now, that saying “girl” means someone like me speaking her name is ignorant somehow.
Which is ignorant in itself. No fault in my boy for being thirty and breathing on this earth, facing what no man should face who hasn’t raised a hand in anger or greed or meanness. Those that make an argument over “woman” and “girl” ought to go about thanking God for keeping his back turned to their lives and giving them the peace to talk like there’s nothing to life but manners.
Carson lives with me, his thirty years exactly half my age, something I considered on more often before the girl killed herself. The newspaper story seemed to raise the question of statutory rape. My son had known the girl for over a year, the story read, which made the girl seventeen and my son twenty-nine at the beginning. There was no evidence, with her dead, that my son had slept with her then, but I knew what people concluded, how they cursed him in their kitchens over coffee, the newspaper slapped onto a table as if a fly had settled on sugar scattered from a half-eaten doughnut.
But what gives him greater blame, for most, is they were talking on their cell phones when she did it to herself. “It’s time,” she said. “I’ll see you soon,” like there was a place they were going and they’d bought tickets together.
My son’s number was on the girl’s phone. Anyone could have made the connection about who she’d talked to last, but Carson didn’t hide from the truth like he could have. He gave up the details of her talking for ten minutes, maybe more, about shooting herself, and him not doing anything but asking her to get hold of herself like what they were doing was rehearsing. Instead of driving her way as they talked. Instead of speeding. Like she killed herself because he hadn’t arrived in time to take that gun from her hand. “Like I wasn’t trying very hard to get her to change her mind,” Carson said, explaining how it happened to the police who would have been satisfied with a story that didn’t disgust them.
I used the computer at work and looked up cell phone suicide. The only entry was the article about my son and the girl. In this day and age, what are the chances we know of only one occurrence of anything besides creation?
“I heard the shot, Dad,” my son told me. “I listened for a good long time because I expected Megan to come back on and lecture me about being late, how terrible I should feel if I was still sitting in one spot like a dispatcher. I expected her to say she fired a shot into the air to scare me, that when I answered she’d tell me I couldn’t be trusted and she was thinking maybe she’d never talk to me again.”
“I believe you.”
“She knew I was in Callington. I’d told her where I was going. It was like she waited until I was thirty-five miles away, with twenty stop lights in between, so she knew I’d just talk and listen instead of driving as fast as I could. It’s like she wanted to be sure I couldn’t take that gun away. What’s that all about, Dad?”
“Punishment,” I said at once, though I wanted to say “lunacy” or worse.
“Really? You think so? Well, then it’s fucking hard time is what it is. A life fucking sentence.” I nodded, but I wasn’t sure Carson could tell because we were sitting in the living room, the lights out ever since a brick had been thrown through the window the night before after the story reached the news. Two bricks. Simultaneously, so there was a message that said that anger wasn’t acting alone. “Nobody would do that, Dad, not on the phone. What kind of asshole did she think I was?”
“I don’t know. Someone she made up, maybe?”
“I thought I was the guy she needed, Dad. For all the right reasons. I liked hearing her say she absolutely depended on me.”
“It’s not slamming your door and locking it for a night. You can’t come back.”
“I’m still here, Dad. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Neither am I.”
“Yeah,” Carson said, though there was nothing in his voice that suggested that mattered.
After the police had left, Carson told me he’d fired the suicide-gun once. “’So you know what it’s like,’” he told me the girl had said. “’So you’re not a hand gun virgin.’”
He wanted me to know that he’d missed the beer can she’d set up twenty-five feet away, but she’d smiled. “I think I was supposed to understand something, Dad, but it went right past me.”
Right then I thought she’d wanted him to make a pact with her, that if Carson were another sort of man, he’d have driven to where she was laying there dead, pick up that gun, and put it to his head, but there was no way to bring that up.
One child was all I had, marrying Cheryl late, at twenty-nine, a father at thirty; Cheryl was just past thirty herself when she left nearly twenty years ago. I’ve thought of calling Cheryl and telling her “See?” but I haven’t. She’s in South Carolina with a construction worker, or at least she was a year ago when she sent Carson a birthday card with twenty-nine dollars, a twenty, a five, and four ones wrinkled like she’d found them stuffed in a jar somewhere.
A minister was quoted in the paper. Reporters always seek out a minister about such things. As if by studying on the Bible they know some secret thing about death. And yet the words they spout are always about mystery and faith, things anyone could say. It’s enough to make a man wish hell someplace real just to see the lot of them surprised at their sentence for all the time offering up their cheap comforts. At first, they’d believe they were in heaven, all of them congratulating each other for being chosen. It might even take a few lifetimes for them to understand they were being punished, having to listen to each other’s bullshit forever and ever, amen.
Back when Cheryl had run off, the pastor of the church she’d dragged Carson to whenever she had a spell of thinking that would do him good had actually knocked on my door like a salesman. He stood under the porch light, his collar gleaming, but I planted myself in the doorway instead of inviting him inside and giving him a chance to make an apology for presuming something. He offered his hand, and I was polite enough to extend mine. “Everything happens for a reason,” that minister said, clasping my hand between his, and I stared at him until he dropped those hands that felt soft as a woman’s and backed away. He might as well have been peddling whole-house smoke alarms or security systems, ready to use fear to open my wallet.
“Well then,” I said, looking down at his hands and up at his face. “Well.”
What I could tell him right now is that every day I expect my son dead. That he’s sold his computer and thrown away his cell phone for a reason. In the house is just the television now, like it was when I was thirty, the phone without an answering machine because I removed it after the first three messages were left, cursing him or me or the both of us.
I’ve been a warehouse manager for a grocery store chain since before Carson was born. You handle that job by finding men who are reliable. It doesn’t matter if they know anything at all but what a conscience is, showing up because it’s right, not because they expect a raise. The pallets get loaded and unloaded, boxes and crates get located and moved. It’s all shuffling and reshuffling, but more often than not, there’s failure, men who can’t any more be counted on than the drunk can be to keep his sober pledge.
I heard things all the time after Carson’s mess, not in so many words, but clear just the same. My boy had gotten the girl pregnant. My boy had been having an unnatural relationship and taken advantage. My boy had gotten the girl deep into drugs. My boy had pictures of that girl, the kind that get on peoples’ computers, passed around like a bottle.
What happened was the men who work under me turned silent. The radio that was tuned to the rock of the 70s, 80s, 90s and today seemed louder, and I realized how repetitious the play list was, that I heard the same songs nearly every day by Tom Petty and the Eagles and Phil Collins.
Then there were little things, like an itch, that started. The work slowed getting done, a pallet load collapsed. “Those men believe I’ll be held responsible,” I told Carson. “They’ve spread the problems among everyone.”
“Jesus, Dad, you’ve worked with some of them for as long as I can remember. It’s not about you, what they should be thinking.”
“For them, it is. They’ll see to it that I’m injured, crippled maybe, or worse. It’s just the when of it I don’t know. Those men are daring me. There’s going to be an accident. They want me to know that.”
Carson drew I his breath so hard, I heard it hiss between his teeth. “Fuck all of them, Dad. Pick two and fire them. Let them know what a scapegoat is.”
I’ve read about counseling for these things, but Carson refused, and I hardly believed in it any more than heaven myself. It’s like hypnotism. You’re not going to be changed if you’re not willing.
So the both of us walked through one week and then another as if we’d settled on accepting our particular miseries, though there wasn’t a day going by that I didn’t wonder what I’d ever managed to give to Carson besides shouldering the load like something that walked on four legs. Whether he had ever acted out of believing in something I cared about. Whether he saw that it was unlikely not to hurt someone if he followed only his own convictions. I wanted to tell him that love, or at least desire, might mean that equation was impossible, that the fortunate get a few years of joy followed, at best, by wistfulness. That regret and anger and bitterness are something like arthritis in the heart.
Cheryl used to stop me from talking like this. “Where do you hear these things?” she would say. “You never go anywhere except to the warehouse, and the men you work with just swear and grunt.”
Three times, maybe four, like that, and her scolding shut me up no matter what I was thinking. By then I didn’t have to work out the words in my head because I knew them by heart like the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge to the flag. Though it took something like another five years of her testing herself with other men before she chose the construction worker who drove her away to South Carolina.
Now all I think is the simple language of “You have to let this go,” what anyone could say to himself.
Near the end of the second week, instead of being at work like he always was when I got home on a Thursday, Carson was sitting in front of the television, and the first thing I thought of was he’d been drinking, but there wasn’t a can or a bottle near him or in the trash when I checked before I worked up the courage to find out what sat him there so early.
“I had to quit my job, Dad,” he said. “This thing caught up to me there,” and I looked at the television where the Phillies were batting in the bottom of the first, two outs, a man on second, the count one ball and one strike, as if all those numbers were a clock so I could mark the moment by exactly where that game stood when I knew that the house I’d lived in for more than thirty years might as well have burned to the ground.
“What happened?” I finally had to say.
“Some family left,” Carson said. “‘I have daughters,’ the man said as he got up, loud enough so half a dozen tables looked. They waited until I’d taken their order, then they walked out. I think they hoped I’d have to pay for their meals.”
“That’s just the one jerk,” I said.
“The first hour of my shift there was a table with a ninety-five-dollar tab that stiffed me. That happens, but not this “
“Still the one time,” I said, like that was all there was, that he’d understand he’d overreacted.
“The others didn’t talk so loud. There’s been a few tables who asked to be seated where I wasn’t serving. Cicero does hosting half the time. He’s noticed. And there was a group that just turned around and left on Tuesday. Cicero can’t afford me now. I quit before he had to fire me.”
“There’s other restaurants,” I said, regretting it at once.
“In another country, maybe.”
“Closer than that,” I said at once, but the next morning, driving to work, I thought about how far away that country needed to be, and I decided two hundred miles, added fifty more to be safe and drew a line near the opposite edge of Pennsylvania on the map I pulled out of the glove compartment.
And after another two weeks, when, as if he’d held the gun to her head, nobody hired my son, not for any job whatsoever, I started thinking of the words I could use to tell him we should move, that the both of us could get set up with any sort of work, that over time he could decide his future rather than have it decided for him.
First, I went to see Jimmy Cicero, walking in so early that I couldn’t imagine anyone being hungry yet and starting straight in with an apology for taking his time while he was on the job. “I know who you are, Mr. Henske,” Cicero said, offering his hand.
“I’m only asking you to be fair about my son’s work if somebody asks.”
“If somebody asks, sure.” Fair enough, but right then I couldn’t work out how it would make a difference. I looked around the nearly deserted restaurant, examined the two young men who were arranging place settings on dark purple tablecloths, the silverware taking the light in a way that made me think a doctor could use them for an emergency without worrying about infection. They looked like boys I would welcome into my house.
Cicero sighed, and for a moment I thought he was considering how to dismiss me with a polite excuse, but he said, “Your boy did good work, but it’s a public business. He did right by me walking away. I’m not going to forget.”
“If I can talk him into the both of us moving, somebody will call you from miles away.”
“I’d be happy to take that call.”
“They’ll ask why he left.”
“Because you moved.”
“And they’ll ask if there’s anything else they need to know.”
“Nothing.”
“Which is the truth.”
“How many miles?” Cicero said then, and I told him I’d only picked the distance so far, not the place. The tables were finished. The wait staff had vanished.
“You have another minute?” I said, and when Cicero nodded, I went to the car and came back with the map.
As soon as Cicero leaned over it, the part of Pennsylvania left for living in looked as small as one of those island countries nobody but a geography expert knows the name of. For a minute, he scanned that space, his eyes following the line as if he was planning a trip himself. Finally, he put his finger on a name. “This is like a treasure map, Mr. Henske, but I can put a star right here for you. I have a cousin has his own place there with a liquor license and real meals that take good help.”
“You’ll put a word in for Carson?”
“More than that, Mr. Henske. A star on your map means ‘go there.’” He glanced down again and laid his finger on the town’s name as if I might forget. “It’s the country there, you know, not like here so near to Philadelphia, but the restaurant is a place where the customers feel like they’re in the city.”
I shook Cicero’s hand. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “The girl was beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I said, folding the map so the town stayed visible.
“And what will you do? Mr. Henske?”
“There’s always work if you want it,” I said.
“Bad work,” Cicero said. “With bad pay.”
“At sixty, whatever I take will be temporary. A few years of anything is ok.”
“Your boy will have a job,” Cicero said. “And you’ll have a place to stay when you get there.”
“We’ll pay.”
“I know that and so will the man I’m talking about.” And because I needed to believe Jimmy Cicero or ask my son to run away like a child with a lunch box full of snack food and a change of clothes, I called my boss and said I wasn’t coming in the next morning. I had five sick days. I could wait another day, maybe two, before I broke my news, my check direct deposit so I didn’t have to go near the warehouse again because I’d never been one to store personal items in my locker, not even magazines or a coffee mug.
When I told Carson my plan, he shook his head. “You went and begged?”
“Cicero likes you. He brought it up, this place.”
“And you’ll do what when we get there?”
“I’ll find something. I don’t have a lifetime in front of me.”
“That’s crazy. And if it’s not crazy, it’s charity,” he said. “I can get something if I keep looking.”
“A man without work is crippled.”
“There’s places that don’t care. There’s places that don’t even know,” he said, so much a lie to keep me from throwing away my own work he sounded like he was talking about finding a cure for some cancer that had given him a few weeks to live.
“Where there’s the work you do, they know. You know this.”
“I’m not a celebrity.”
“That’s right. Celebrities get to write a book. We own here, but we can rent what Cicero’s cousin has waiting until we can buy again.”
“So we’re already gone? You think I’m a little kid you don’t even have to ask?”
Two hundred and fifty miles. My drawing that line had sounded childish when I explained it to Jimmy Cicero, but I felt my chest tighten as if I’d slapped his face for the smallest bit of back talk.
I woke at five-fifteen the day we moved. The pair of shoes I’d left out of the truck we’d rented were sitting in the empty closet as if I’d died. The street sweeper’s approach seemed so much an army invading I parted the drapes an inch to look at what I could have seen once a week, from April to November, for more than thirty years.
The vacuum tracks I’d left the night before still showed except where I’d walked back to bed from the bathroom, and I wondered, for a moment, what Carson and I had overlooked, something of ours waiting to be found by the next owner the way I discovered some mushroomed darkness under the refrigerator in my first furnished apartment, its fine hair like worthless legs, something to brush into a dust pan, looking away as I dropped it down the drain and ran hot water as if scalding would erase the chance of it crawling back into my future.
Though I hadn’t yet sold the house, Carson had found a buyer for his old car, a piece of junk, so we both appreciated that fool for thinking he’d stolen it for talking Carson down to $800 from $1200, wanting to prove something to Carson about what he deserved for letting a girl kill herself while he held a phone to his ear.
“A thousand miles he’ll get out of it if he’s lucky,” Carson said, and me happy he was free now to drive the rental truck. We might as well have been pioneers, our stunted wagon train crossing over Pennsylvania without any sense of where we were ending up except for pictures we looked up on the town library’s computer.
I have to say I felt relieved when the town looked pretty much like it did in those photographs that must have been taken from the top of the mountain we reached just before we got there, the river running below us like a welcome sign. I pulled off at the “scenic view,” and Carson, with no choice, pulled in behind me where there were two picnic tables, following as I walked to the edge that wasn’t protected by a fence.
“You saw the signs?” I said, not there for the scenery. “This isn’t a place for making a mistake with the truck.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll keep it downshifted.”
“I’ll go in front of you, just in case.”
“Just in case of what? If I lose it, I’ll take you right into that river with me. Go behind me so you don’t make me nervous.”
I swept one arm out toward the town as if I was finished being concerned about anything but wanting to memorize where we’d come to. “Look at this view and not a soul up here but us.”
“Everybody lives here, Dad. They don’t use a road like this unless they have to. They go somewhere else for scenery.”
“Ok,” I said. “I’ll look up at the sky like I’ve lived here for twenty years.” It was only 250 miles, just east to west, but the clouds looked different, like there was one of those longitude lines we’d crossed and the sky changed. The clouds looked like they hadn’t been there as long, like the shape of the sky itself hadn’t formed until after pioneers moving west after a place like Philadelphia had settled into permanence. My life already felt smaller, as if I’d moved for the last time, as if when misery chased us down, I’d surrender. “You go first, and let’s get down and find out how big a favor Jimmy Cicero has done for us.”
When Carson’s brake lights only came on a few times, I stopped holding my breath, but half way down was an emergency exit, a cleared space filled in with sand for a makeshift road, a stack of sandbags at its end. It looked smooth, as if it had been recently raked. And a quarter mile farther down, anyone could see why. It was more than the length and steepness of the highway. There was a sharp bend just before the bridge, a turn nobody could make at any sort of speed.
Because I had the address and the directions to the house, Carson let me slip past him on Market, the street that split the town, but he knew enough to lay on the horn when I passed Spruce, the first turn we were supposed to take. I went through two of the three stop lights and slowed so I knew he’d have to look to see where I was forcing him to go. The restaurant was on our right. The Gold Lantern in a classy-looking script. Fine Dining in smaller lettering below to signal that you came there for something besides spaghetti and barbeque. This time I sounded my horn before I made a left, then another, and made my way back to Spruce.
The house, when we reached it on Miner, looked small and gave signs of having the sort of issues that would make it hard to sell. A porch roof that sagged on one end, a suspicious crack along the cinderblock at its base on one side. “It’s a house,” I said, and Carson smiled for the first time in so long I added, “Sure the fuck is” like my brain had skidded into that emergency sand.
“I know what you mean, Dad,” Carson said. “It’s not an apartment.”
“Living in another man’s house is something I never expected,” I said.
I unloaded light, and Carson unloaded heavy except for what needed to be shared. I spent the two blocks of walking to the convenience store working out the soreness settling into my knees and shoulders, but the clerk told me there hadn’t been a local paper for three years now, just the Penny Saver stacked up by the door. “Ads are all I need,” I said, and the clerk shrugged like she’d heard that line a hundred times.
I scanned all eight pages, even the For Sale notices where I marked where cars were listed for less than $2000. And then I circled three of the help-wanteds, the ones promising more than $10 an hour, a way of screening out the worst of what I read. I was used to work, but not to slavery. After I made the phone calls and set up an appointment with the only one that was still looking, I found the instructions for the microwave in the box it had come in months ago when I’d bought it. I read the directions for setting the clock, something I’d never done. The time of day hadn’t seemed to matter in my own house if all I was doing was reheating leftovers or cooking a frozen dinner.
I pushed the button for “clock” and set the hour, then the minutes, and when I saw it blink to the next minute, I drove to the beer distributor, bought a case, and picked up a large pizza before driving back to where Carson was setting up his room.
“Celebrating?” Carson said, taking the beer I offered and lifting a slice of pepperoni from the box.
“Taking a breath,” I said. “Getting our second wind.”
”A year from now this will live with me. Two years. Ten.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“There’s no word for how sure I am. It’s like hearing your heart beating. Something you can’t bear to listen to.”
“I’ll get busy and so will you,” I said. “We’re under the same roof, but you come and go as you please.”
“I can’t do one thing as I please.”
It sounded so much like whining that I said, “I’m not telling you something you can just bully until it shuts up.”
“Where did that come from?” Carson said, sounding so much like his mother I shook my head, ending things before I added that what I wanted, just then, was for him to meet a woman instead of a girl, for her to be thirty, too, or near to it, somebody past exaggerating the importance of everything. “I have an interview at a body shop tomorrow morning,” I said, and let Carson laugh for a few seconds before I said, “To keep the books, to handle appointments.”
The body shop owner was short and skinny, closer to Carson’s age than mine but wearing a hat inside the way a man in his thirties does when he’s gone bald early. “I’ll make this easy,” he said. “I need somebody good with figures who takes cash only for pay.” The cramped office had been added to the house, I decided, the inside door leading to the kitchen from where some faintly rancid smell seeped out. Clots of crumb-clogged dog hair were scattered across the cheap carpet, “The wife took off and I’m stuck with keeping up with everything. I have to trust you, but just in case, there’s Ebony inside. My black lab. She’ll do a number on you if you step through that door there.”
He gestured to the two-drawer metal file, the particle-board desk. “We got no computer to fuck with if that’s a concern of yours. It’s eight an hour, but no deductions and off the government’s radar. I figure it’s eleven an hour, maybe more, like the ad says. You live with that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s get ourselves acquainted a bit. You show me yours, I show you mine about this here work needs doing.”
I spent a half hour running through the adding and subtracting, taking two phone calls and processing payment from a customer before he nodded and asked me for some ID, “just to be all formal.”
He studied my driver’s license like I wanted to board a plane. “You related to that fellow listened to a girl kill herself on the phone?” he said, squinting at me as if he could read my answer somewhere on my face.
“Why?” I said, though he had the look of somebody who’d already decided.
“He has your name.”
“Henske’s not that unusual.”
“Around here, it is.”
“There were a few dozen in the phone back where I moved from,” a lie he’d never check up on.
“Well, count yourself lucky then having nothing to do with a piece of shit lets a girl shoot herself without lifting a finger.”
The hat had shadowed his face, but now that he’d raised my license to the light as if he thought it might be counterfeit, the dark stubble on his hollowed-out cheeks suggested sickness more than neglect, as if some disease had festered in him so long it was sprouting mold. “I don’t give two shits about another man’s business as long as he’s reliable,” he said then, causing me to hate myself more for saying “Thank you” and extending my hand.
When I got back, Carson had broken down the cardboard boxes and had them outside waiting for the Highlander. “I’m hired,” I said.
“Everything’s too easy,” he said, but he went back inside and returned with a wastebasket full of empty beer cans and set it on the floor behind the passenger seat. “These go too,” and I picked up a stack of cardboard and laid it in the back.
We were living in a borrowed house, but everything we didn’t need still had to be recycled same as before. The old phone book gave the address of the place in town that would have a row of dumpsters people filled–clear plastic, corrugated cardboard, aluminum, magazines, etc., the same twelve categories, it turned out, that had been provided two hundred and fifty-seven miles to the east, as if everyone accumulated the same sorts of things they needed to be rid of. It was almost reassuring, when we arrived, that, as always, the others tossing items into the dumpsters looked to be older than me, as if recycling came with retirement age. Their expressions didn’t change as Carson and I unloaded and searched for the proper dumpster. When nobody greeted us, it was a good thing to be ignored.
After the second load, we had space to start arranging things, but I was ready to call things off. “We should get some dinner,” I said. “The rest can wait.”
“Let’s get this finished first,” Carson said.
“I can call someplace, have something delivered.”
“Just give this another hour.”
He sounded so normal I nearly hugged him. Both of us were working tomorrow, and though Carson was beginning with the lunch shift where less money was made, I thought we’d finished something we could close a lid on.
I mentioned the bar we’d seen only a block past the convenience store, a place that looked like a converted house as if a zoning law had been changed after the neighborhood began to go to seed, but Carson said, “Let’s drive out of town while it’s still light, Let’s see what’s here if we go farther than a couple of miles.”
It took sixteen miles before we reached the edge of another town and two bars appeared, one on each side of the highway. “The one on the left, Dad,” Carson said, “so we don’t have to cross traffic when we leave. It’ll be dark and the weather is starting to suck.”
We had chicken wings, none of them crispy enough even though Carson sent them back for another dunking in the deep fryer. It was a good thing to be having more than one beer to soften the bartender’s look when Carson insisted.
The fourth beer came as we finished those wings, both of us pacing ourselves because of the upcoming return trip, but the place was noisy now, and maybe knowing our conversation wouldn’t carry helped Carson say, “Megan took these pills, Dad. You know, to keep her steady, and yet she wasn’t anyway as it turned out.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“You talked to her maybe ten different times, Dad. Did you ever think she was like somebody who’d shoot themselves?”
“No,” I said, the truth, because I’d envied my boy his good luck, the girl talking a blue streak something a boy would overlook with her looks the way they were.
“Once you start with the pills, you can’t stop, Dad. Every day, take pills, and you forget who you were before.”
“Maybe you don’t forget,” I said, and my son looked away as if he was scanning the bar for somebody he knew.
“Maybe,” he said at last, not facing me now.
And what I didn’t say was I believed the pills made it a sure thing she’d remember who she was before them. And when he looked away a second time, keeping his eyes fixed on the television where a baseball game was starting, this far west the Pirates, I remembered “arthritis in the heart,” and the words sounded like they could only be uttered by a man who never did a real day’s work.
Outside, ten minutes later, I saw that Carson had been right. It was still twilight, but rain had started, and the sky had darkened early. Already there was a hint of fog. “A good night not to be coming down that mountain,” I said.
When Carson didn’t offer anything for a few miles, I started to lose the momentum the four beers and the chicken wings had given me. “Well,” I said at last. “Here’s to a fresh start,” and I gestured toward the windshield wipers sweeping side to side as I’d said something smart that needed a clue to be deciphered.
“I’m using my middle name here, Dad. I’m Lee now, but maybe that’s not enough to last.”
“Lee,” I said, as if I was tasting it.
“Whoever looks at me and thinks he knows me will check my name tag and think he’s wrong.”.
“We’re nearly out of state. The town doesn’t even have a real newspaper.”
“Everybody has a computer. You can’t just move, Dad. Everything follows you now. People have friends everywhere, people they’ll never even meet. They talk about what happens where they live”
“God damn all those friends then,” I said. “God damn all this talking to nobody but a set of fingers.” I started to imagine a girl telling all her Facebook friends she was going to shoot herself, how there would be a hundred comments from people, none of them preventing that girl from killing herself.
“There’s way worse, Dad. Think videos. Think live-stream.”
I imagined a girl sending her video death to a million friends who would sit and watch. And even as I imagined it, I was sure it was happening because I knew nothing about the evolution of friendship. I wiped my side of the windshield with my hand, but it didn’t clear much, and not knowing the road made it harder, every bend making me remember the one at the base of the mountain until it flattened out and I was left feeling foolish for my caution. “I don’t need much,” I managed to say, “just to believe you’re safe.”
“Appreciated,” he said, “but there’s more you need.”
“Like what?”
“Friends, maybe, or . . . “ He seemed to swallow what would have come next.
“What else?” I said, and when he didn’t answer I was sure he’d begun to say his mother’s name or just “a woman.”
“You’re going so slow the cops will think you’re drunk, Dad.” he said.
“It’s raining hard.”
“You’re going slower than that. I’m serious. We’ll get pulled over and you with four beers in you.”
“A couple of beers isn’t drunk.”
He was looking at the side mirror as if he expected headlights. He threw his head back in a way that reminded me of how he used to use that gesture when he argued with me before the suicide. “Jesus, Dad,” he said, but now his urging made me hope I could sustain exactly my speed because I loved hearing him talk as if he cared about what happened in the ordinary world.
The road stayed dark behind us for another minute while he stared at the mirror. “She wanted to make me suffer, Dad, but being dead means she’ll never know.”
“There’s no sense in it,” I said, but I didn’t take my eyes off the road.
“Suicides do that, right? But she was wrong. I can’t see her dead.”
“I can’t see your mother with another man,” I said, and I let the car slow even further, as if my right leg had grown numb, as if we were going to coast to a stop even though there wasn’t a sign of a house.
“Dad,” he said. “Drive.” Not asking for speed now. Fear in his voice. The headlights he’d been waiting for, when they finally appeared, came up fast, and when the car passed, I accelerated, using the tail lights as a guide, settling in at the speed that stranger set for me.
Gary Fincke is the author of multiple books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. His latest collection of stories is After the Locks are Changed (Stephen F. Austin, 2024). Earlier collections won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. The Comfort of Taboos: More Selected Stories will be published by Braddock Avenue Books in October. He is the Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.