Chapter 10: The Morning After
The frost didn't melt off the windowpanes until past nine. By then, the kitchen had warmed up enough for the old iron kettle to start singing a low, wheezing tune on the four-burner stove. I sat there in the straight-backed wooden chair, my coffee mug cold between my palms, watching the gray light shift across the linoleum floor.
The house was too quiet. Back in the garage, there was always the rhythmic clack-clack of a piston on the bench, or the low hum of the radio playing country stations out of Spokane, or the hiss of the welding torch eating through a patch panel. Here, the only sound was the muffled rustle of wool blankets from the back room where Leo was sleeping off the sulfur and the fever.
The back door creaked, and Sarah stepped in from the porch, her boots crunching on the frozen ruts of the small garden patch. She had a bundle of kindling tucked under one arm and a strip of grease-stained canvas in her hand. Her face looked pinched around the mouth, the skin pale beneath the freckles that stretched across her nose, but her shoulders were set. She didn't look like a girl thumbing rides on Route 4 anymore. She looked like a woman who had spent twenty years keeping a fire alive with wet wood and nothing else.
"He's still asleep," she said, dropping the kindling into the woodbox by the stove with a dry clatter. "Breathing's deep. No rattling."
"Good," I said, not looking up from the rim of my cup. "Sterling said the lungs were clear. Just exhaustion. Said he needs three square meals a day and someone to keep him from sleeping in the damp."
Sarah walked over to the sink, turned the handle until the copper pipe groaned, and splashed some cold water over her hands. She didn't dry them on the towel hanging from the cabinet; she just shook them off, the droplets hitting the linoleum with sharp little taps.
"Three square meals," she repeated, her voice dry as dead cedar. "That's a rich man's prescription, Jackson. We haven't had three square meals on the same Tuesday since the lumber mill shut down in '98."
"I've got the garage," I said, finally raising my head to look at her. "There's work coming in from the highway. People always need their brakes done before the snow sets over the pass. We aren't going to starve on Maple Street."
She turned around, leaning back against the edge of the laminate counter, her arms crossed tight over her chest. Her eyes weren't angry; they were worse than that—they were tired, the kind of tired that doesn't go away with a weekend of sleeping.
"And the other thing?" she asked. "The sheriff? Arthur Miller was down at the corner store yesterday morning, before the boy took sick. He was asking if Jackson Vance had taken in stray dogs or if he was planning on staying in one county long enough to pay property tax."
"Arthur knows where I am," I said, standing up so the chair legs scraped against the floor. "He's known since I came back from the coast five years ago. I'm not hiding."
"You were hiding from Leo," she said softly.
That hit me somewhere behind the breastbone, right where the old scar from the lowside crash in Montana still ached when the barometer dropped. I didn't have an answer for it, because she was right. For twenty years, I had convinced myself that my absence was a favor—that the Vance blood was like a bad weld, looking solid on the outside while the metal was eaten out by rust underneath. I had left her with a faded photograph and a ten-dollar bill in a roadside diner because I thought the best thing I could give a kid with my eyes was a clear road with my dust already settled.
"He came to the counter, Sarah," I said, keeping my voice level, though my throat felt thick. "He walked straight into the rally with that picture in his hand. He looked at me like I was something he'd found in a book."
"He's got your jaw," she whispered, looking past me toward the hallway that led to the back bedroom. "And your stubborn streak. God help him, he won't let a thing go once he gets his teeth into it. I told him a hundred times that his father was gone over the mountains, that men like you don't come back when the snow starts falling. He didn't believe me. He kept that picture tucked behind his collar like a saint's medal."
Before I could answer, a small scuff of wool slippers sounded on the floorboards in the hall. We both turned.
Leo was standing in the doorway, wearing one of my old flannel work shirts that hung down past his knees like a preacher's robe. His hair was sticking up on one side where he'd been pressed against the pillow, and his hazel eyes were wide and bright, the fever mostly burned out of him. He was holding the small folded paper in his left hand, his thumb working the crease over and over.
"Can I have some water?" he asked, his voice rough with sleep.
Sarah was moving before I could take half a step. She crossed the kitchen, knelt down in front of him, and pressed the back of her hand against his forehead, checking for heat.
"You're a nuisance, Leo Vance," she said, though her mouth was twitching at the corners with something that looked almost like a smile. "Just a plain, hard-headed nuisance."
She filled an enamel cup from the pitcher on the table and handed it to him. He drank it down in three long pulls, never taking his eyes off me. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, walked past his mother without a word, and stopped right in front of where I was standing by the stove.
"Are you going back to the garage today?" he asked.
"I have to," I said. "There's an old Ford pickup out in the bay with a cracked manifold. If I don't torch it out, the owner's going to be sleeping in my office."
Leo looked down at the floor, his toe tracing the pattern of a faded blue daisy on the linoleum. Then he reached out and grabbed the hem of my jacket—the same greasy leather vest I'd worn into the diner, smelling of two-stroke oil and old tobacco.
"Can I come?" he asked. "I can hold the wrenches. My hands aren't too small for the seven-sixteenths anymore."
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I looked down at the top of his head, at the messy light brown hair that wouldn't ever lie flat no matter how much water you combed into it. I thought about the road outside, the gray timber, the townspeople watching from behind their clean white curtains, and the twenty years of dust I'd left behind me in every ditch between here and the coast.
"Put your boots on, then," I said, reaching out to cuff him lightly on the shoulder. "The big ones with the steel toes. You're going to need 'em if you're working in my shop."
