“OK,” he whispered. He shook his head, staring into his mug.
She reached over and put a hand on his forearm. “Boyd. Come on.”
He looked up, his blue eyes shining. “That man walked all that way. Somehow made his way. It wasn’t until he got here—” He couldn’t finish. His eyes spilled over and he pressed them with a forefinger and thumb.
“Boyd.”
“You know something, May? I’ve wasted my life one night at a time, four beers in and trying to win people over. Some stupid joke. Some stupid story. Some stupid lie.”
“Come on now.”
May stood up and joined him on his side of the booth, and put her arm around him.
“I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.”
“Well,” she said, and nudged him, laughing softly.
“It’s like I’m standing right beside myself all the time.”
“Listen, Boyd. We were all responsible this summer. You didn’t mean any real harm.” She jostled him lightly. “Did you?”
He sniffed and sucked air in through his mouth and wiped his nose. “Seems like it started with me, doesn’t it?”
“That’s just people talking. Always been a place of big stories, hasn’t it? You’re only a man, Boyd. So you don’t always get it right. Did you ever meet someone who did?”
He was quiet a minute. “John Walker. Didn’t he? Didn’t you say you should have been so lucky? Have a man like he was?”
“I don’t know how perfect he was.” She sighed. “Pretty odd fellow and before the summer anyone else would have said the same.”
“I guess maybe they still do.”
“He left his wife and kid without much to go on, and by his own stubborn lights. Didn’t he?”
“I guess so.”
“And I’ll tell you something else. For years I’ve heard you repeat the same jokes and stories in that bar, night after night.”
“I know,” he said. “Even the good ones are old. I haven’t said anything new since I was fifteen.”
“What I was going to say is that I haven’t heard any of those stories in weeks. A month. You’ve been quiet.”
“Well, it’s been growing on me,” he said. “Being sorry.”
“OK. It’s a change. Right?”
He shrugged.
“Come on,” she nudged him. “Let’s make a plan. Is this our home? That’s Boyd’s Bar across the street, isn’t it? And this is the Lucy Graves.”
He shrugged. “What is that,” he said, “nostalgia?”
“God help me, I’m not that old and useless. I’m talking about today. Tonight. And our friends here.”
“No new restaurant and pub in Burnsville.”
She shook her head. “I have to stay.” She pulled him toward her and he put his forehead on her chest.
“We’ll stay,” he said into her shirt. “Shit.”
She put her hand over the top of his head. “Then let’s go into that bar of yours across the street, and prop open that big old door, and open up a couple of cold beers, and turn on the radio. There’s a cool breeze.”
He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Deserve has nothing to do with what we get,” she said, and pulled him up. When they stood, May glanced out the window and grabbed Boyd’s upper arm.
“Now what in the hell,” he said.
It was a truck from a Burnsville towing company hauling the Walkers’ old blue Silverado through town.
“I have a feeling I better get Leigh.”
~ ~ ~
Leigh swung her duffel bag into the back of Boyd’s truck and climbed in the cab. May started the engine and pulled out of the dormitory parking lot. It was a picture-perfect day in mid-October and everyone was out. She crossed her arms, eyes red, and turned away from her mother. They’d been twenty minutes on the phone at dawn that morning, a call that was accusatory on May’s end, defensive on Leigh’s, and which had ended with an arranged meeting time on campus and without a goodbye.
They waited at a red light and Leigh watched a pack of students dressed in green and gold gear for a football game crossing the street before them, headed toward the shuttle that would take them to the stadium. All her life she was outside a window watching the rest of the world, for a few weeks it had seemed otherwise, and now she was back to where she’d always been. Outside trying to get in, and now dragged backward, back to Lions again. All of that again.
“I just want to make sure I have this timeline straight,” May said, both hands on the wheel as she accelerated on the city street widening into highway. Her gaze was straight ahead, her brow furrowed. The truck was smooth and quiet compared with Gordon’s. “He left two weeks ago?”
“It was like two or three weeks.”
“What day?”
“I don’t know.” She studied the line of cheap motels and derelict mom and pop gas stations. “Middle of the month.”
“Of September.”
“September, yes.”
“A month ago Leigh?”
“Look, mom. He’s the one who left. He didn’t even say goodbye, or tell me he was going. As usual. The Walker MO. Don’t pretend to be surprised.”
“Were you arguing?”
The cars thinned out and the motels gave way to isolated farmsteads and corn stubble. A cheerful man in a denim cap was selling cherry cider and pumpkins and waved at them.
“I’m not interrogating you, Leigh. What are you going to tell Georgie and Dock? Or Chuck?”
“Chuck?”
“We didn’t wait to call him. Do you understand Gordon’s been missing almost a month?”
“He was gone almost that long a couple times this summer. Chuck didn’t want to talk to me then.”
“He was in his truck this summer.”
“And you’re sure it was his truck they found.”
“Leigh.”
“Because John took good care of that truck. It wouldn’t have just died. And Gordon wouldn’t have just left it.”
“It was his truck, it did break down, and Gordon did leave it.”
“You’re saying he just left the truck on the side of the road and disappeared into the wide open prairie.”
“It looks like he must have unloaded everything first. Georgianna must have been asleep. She doesn’t even seem to know he came and left again. It’s a wonder none of us saw him. It must have been the middle of the night.”
Leigh thought she knew which night. “The chair,” she said, and could see the whole living room turned into dorm room restored to living room. She never wanted to see it again. “Well, I don’t know where he is. I don’t see why I need to come home.”
“You didn’t tell anyone.”
“It wasn’t my job.”
“Don’t you care about him?”
“He left. Again. His choice. How was I supposed to know his truck broke down?”
“OK,” May said, nodding, “I’ll give you that.”
“He is not my responsibility.”
May’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them from the corner of her eye with one middle finger, then again on the other side. Leigh turned away and looked out the window.
The sky clouded over behind them and by the time they crossed the county line the clouds had caught up overhead. It was late afternoon on a Saturday and the street downtown was empty, a few scraggly native corn decorations hung on a front door. A lopsided pumpkin on the stoop of the diner, a plastic scarecrow in front of the bar. The diner was empty except for Georgianna, who they could see from the street was refilling the glass sugar canisters at a table by the window.