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“Lucy, I didn’t mean to—”
She put a hand on his forearm and stopped him. “Look, I don’t blame you. For anything. It wasn’t even about you, really. Paul was a shitty husband. I was a shitty wife. It’s fine. We were headed for divorce with or without your sock.” She took a deep breath. “But I’ve spent the last eight years as ‘that cheating wife whose kid ended up on drugs.’ Like some kind of morality tale. So, forgive me if I’m not in a place where I can just sit here and catch up. Reminisce about the old days.”
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” Kinnick said. “I know I fucked everything up.”
“And now... what?” Lucy turned and faced him. “You think you can just drop in andunfuckeverything?”
Rhys hummed a little laugh. “Technically, I think once you’ve fucked everything up, the only way to fix it is to fuck everythingdown.”
She thought about this for a moment. Then she smiled a little, held up her glass, and they toasted.
***
Lucy Park burst into laughter when Kinnick asked her, “Who covers the radical right these days?”
“Uh, the government reporter?”
It took him a moment to understand what she was saying—that no longer was the fringe on the fringe. She explained to him that state legislators, sheriffs, and county commissioners—even members of Congress—openly expressed beliefs that would have gotten them labeled as members of a hate group a few years earlier, or at least as extremists, or unelectable loons. “We’ve got antivaxers and tax protestors, flat-Earth school board members and at least oneposse comitatuscounty commissioner. Oh, there’s also a rural sheriff who sits in the public library all day looking for books about gay penguins so he can confiscate them. We’re on the border of Bizarroland out here.” Kinnick explained that one of the men who had taken his grandchildren was a convicted poacher and “sovereign citizen” whose federal trial he had covered years ago. “Think you could get me any clips you might have on this guy, Dean Burris?”
“Clips?” She laughed and pulled out her cell phone. “You think someone at the newspaper isclippingstories right now, Rhys? Maybe the elevator operator in her off-time?” She pulled out her cell phone. “Here.” She tapped a few things into the phone and read: “Dean Burris? Dominion Eagle Killer?”
“Yeah,” Kinnick said. “I actually named him that.”
“You must be so proud.” She handed her phone to Kinnick.
He held it away, then closer, then away, until Lucy finally handed over her reading glasses, too. “Thanks,” Kinnick said.
It was so strange, trying to read on one of these small screens. How did people do it? He tried to move the page down and somehow made it all disappear and she had to find the stories for him again. Then he lost them a second time, and finally, she got closer to him and used her thumb to effortlessly flip through his three front-pagestories about Dean Burris’s 2012 trial. Their shoulders touching. She smelled great.
“Yep,” Kinnick said, “that’s him, all right.” There was nothing about Burris after those first stories until 2022, when a headline read: “Dominion Eagle Killer Runs for Stevens County Commissioner.” The story explained that after serving two years of a five-year federal sentence, Dean Burris was running for office, offering himself as a proponent of the County Supremacy theory, the belief that county governments didn’t need to adhere to federal and state laws.
“Looks like he didn’t make it out of the primary,” Lucy said.
“Well, that’s comforting. Says here he’s originally from Addy,” Kinnick said. “That’s not far from where I’ve been living.”
“Wait, so this whole time you’ve been just up the road?”
Kinnick handed her phone back. “Well, sixty miles away, but yeah, not far.”
“I assumed you were harassing women in European hostels, or that you’d run off and joined the merchant marines or something.”
“Nah, I moved onto the last bit of our family land, between Springdale and Hunters,” Kinnick said. “My grandfather’s old, vacant cinder block house. Seemed like a good place to disappear.”
“Disappear,” she said, not a question, but a word he couldn’t help wondering if she’d considered it herself.
Kinnick quoted Thoreau again: “?‘A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.’?”
“And what did you think you were letting alone, Rhys?”
“All of it,” he said. “Thirty years of covering science deniers and mindless politics... the triumph of utter stupidity. It had even infected my family.” Kinnick told her the story of the Thanksgiving fight with Shane at Bethany’s house. “My fight with Shane was the last straw. At some point, you look around, and think, I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of this.”
“The world made me do it.”
Pointed, smart Lucy. “No. It was me. Or a team effort, anyway. But I did my part. I had no job. No future. I genuinely thought no one would miss me. I’d alienated everyone I cared about: friends, family, you.”
“Don’t throw me in there.”
“I do recall you saying that you never wanted to see me again.”