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“I don’t want tokeepyour car,” Kinnick said. “I just want to use it a little longer. Just until tomorrow.”
“No problem,” Brian said. “Use it as long as you need.”
“I’m planning to get my car towed out of the Episcopal Church parking lot and taken to a shop tomorrow.”
“If by shop, you mean junkyard, I think that’s a good move. Hey Rhys, listen,” Brian said, “are you sure you don’t want me to come up there?”
“No, you’ve done plenty, Brian. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“No, you probably can’t. Okay, well, if you change your mind—”
“You’ll be my first call,” Kinnick said.
It was another thing about phones now; you didn’t get the satisfying closure of hanging up. You just stopped talking. Pressed a button. So anticlimactic. He handed the phone back to Bethany. “Probably time for me to get one of these things again. I don’t suppose they have one with a rotary dial?”
“We can check.”
They turned past Loon Lake and drove west, down a steep hill and, eventually, through the town of Springdale, turning past the lumber mill on Hunters Road and starting the last ten miles of this journey, back to the place where it had all started. It was a drive that Kinnick could make in his sleep, and he glimpsed, through the trees, familiar old landmarks: listing barns and abandoned cabins, scraggly cattle and sheep moving toward salt blocks and watering troughs. But as much as he’d lived inthisplacethe last seven years, he’d also spent much of that time in his head, hiding (behind self-pity and stubbornness) from the people who needed him. Kinnick glanced over. Asher was asleep again. Bethany was staring out her window. But when they were a mile from his house, she suddenly turned to her dad. “Weren’t you lonely up here?”
“Not at first, no,” he said. “I was happy to be away from the bullshit, the politics and gossip. The division. All the noise I mistook for life. But it sneaks up on you. Eventually, the solitude becomes physical, like thirst. I remember, one day, maybe in my second winter, I started getting this panicky feeling. Like I couldn’t breathe. I used to drive to Springdale and park outside the tavern. Didn’t even go in. I just sat there and waited for someone to come out. It was like I needed to justseeanother human being, to know I wasn’t alone in the world.”
Bethany had a pained look on her face, and he wondered if everything he said from now on would be taken as an affront. (If you were so lonely, Dad,why didn’t you come and seeme?) Should he apologize again? Should every sentence that came out of his mouth begin withI’m sorry?
“Then one day,” he said, “I started goinginsidethe tavern to see people.”
This caused Bethany to smile. “I do understand why you moved up here,” she said. She glanced in the backseat, perhaps to make sure Asher was still asleep, and lowered her voice: “I get it, too, the urge torun. I can’t tell you how many times. To just... go. Leave everything behind. But here’s the thing—in my daydreams? I neverarriveanywhere. There’s never a landing place. And... turns out... itwas nota music festival in Canada.”
They laughed together.
“Do you think I just haven’t found it yet? Or does it not exist?”
Kinnick sighed. “Boy, I wish I knew.” He wanted to keep talking, to tell her that it was okay to leave Shane, if that’s what she wanted to do, that he would help her financially and with the kids, whatever she needed, but he wasn’t sure how she would take that.
Bethany was staring out her window as they passed a makeshift house in the woods, the kind of place Kinnick jokingly called a Stevens County McMansion, tin-roofed pole building thrown up over a single-wide trailer, all rust and exposed timbers, surrounded by a dozen wrecked old cars.
“Well,” Bethany said, “whatever my place is... it’s not out here. I can tell you that.” She glanced over at him. “That woman we saw this morning, Lucy. Was that—”
“Yeah,” Kinnick said. “That was her. Not that it matters now, but back then, when you were fifteen, there wasn’t anything going on with us. Not yet anyway.”
“Then why keep it secret?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I already knew how I felt about her. Because Ihopedsomething would happen. It was like you’d see right through me if I said something.”
“You loved her.”
It wasn’t a question, but it was the same thing Leah had asked about Joanie. This time Kinnick didn’t hesitate. “I did,” he said. “Very much, as it turned out. So much that I convinced myself, in my deep self-loathing, that she’d be better off without me.” He looked over at her again. “I thought that about everyone, for what it’s worth, that you were all better off.”
“And how did we do?” Bethany asked. “Without you?”
He looked over. “You did just fine, Bethany.” He turned the car off Hunters Road and started down the dirt road that led to his driveway.
“Well.” Bethany straightened up. “I’m trying,” she said, the weariness in her voice breaking him a little.
***
They eased over the culvert, up his driveway, past the creek and the little stand of birch trees, until they could see the house and outbuildings, the old broken-down pickup. It was strange for Kinnick, seeing his sad little kingdom this way, after being gone for the first time in years. And to have these other people here, apparently inside his house, with his books and his thoughts and his half-finished projects—he felt a moment of panic. What had he accomplished up here?
There was a car parked at the end of his driveway, near the back door of his cinder block shack: a fifteen-year-old Ford Focus with a Jesus fish bumper sticker and a Covenant College parking pass on the back windshield.