Cash orders the Malibu chicken. Dot and Trev both order the shrimp alfredo. I order coffee and the signature steak, emphasizing the rare, because something about Howard suggests that he’s not a man who understands rare. As soon as he walks off with the menus, Dot retreats to the ladies’ room. Once she’s out of earshot, Cash turns to Trev.
“So, you taking good care of my daughter?” he says.
“How about you?” says Trev.
Cash smiles appreciatively, scratches his neck. “Tough job, right?”
“Nice work, if you can get it.”
Cash nods knowingly, and flips his coffee cup over, just as Howard returns with the coffee. I follow suit, and the three of us sit silently as the cups are filled.
Dot returns, sliding in next to her dad.
“What did he say about me?”
“Nothing,” says Trev.
“I told him how when you were seven years old you wanted to be the surgeon general,” Cash says.
“I never said that.”
“And how you were going to write a constitution for the house pets and how your mom was going to ratify it.”
“You’re making that up.”
“I had to look up ratify,” he says. “Maybe I should tell them about the infamous Barbie boycott of 2000.”
“Do tell,” says Trev.
“Just stop,” says Dot, socking him on the shoulder playfully. I’m guessing she likes the attention. “Oh fine, then,” she says, waving it off. “Tell them whatever you want. It’s probably all made up, anyway.”
Cash tells us about Dot’s childhood propensity for the xylophone, about her love of chinchillas, about how she always insisted on cutting her own hair. Trev is riveted by it all. Howard arrives with the platters, bumbles through the service, and bids us adieu. Sure enough, my steak is tougher than a new saddlebag, with maybe a quarter inch of pink in the center—rare like a mosquito in the Everglades. But the rice is decent, in a TV dinner sort of way, and the cheese bread, though oily and slightly off-color, is strangely satisfying.
Cash, meanwhile, inhales his Malibu chicken, nodding enthusiastically throughout. Trev skewers the shrimp out of his alfredo one at a time with his fork while Dot picks around the edges of her plate, rearranging the pasta more than eating it. I can almost feel Trev’s heart breaking as he watches her—stealthily, or so he thinks—spindle fettuccine around her fork.
After dinner, once we’re back out in the night air, Dot stops in front of the Skylark, spinning the ring on her finger. “So, I think I might ride with my dad for the next stretch,” she says, a little apologetically. “Help him stay awake.”
“That’s cool,” says Trev, but he can’t hide his disappointment. The next stretch will probably be the last stretch, which means he’s got nothing to look forward to but a good-bye. Dot can see he’s forlorn, but she’s not going to start pitying him now.
“So, we’ll see you at the next stop,” she says.
“Cool.”
As Dot climbs into the Skylark, I hear her say, “Can we at least listen to a different tape?”
The final long dark stretch to Salt Lake City is mostly silent. Trev is awake the whole way, gazing dully out the window, as the mile markers fly by faster than ever. I do my best to cheer him.
“Five to one your old man’s fly is down when he answers the door. What do you bet he’s got a bucket of KFC waiting?”
“Probably,” he says.
A little after midnight, the outskirts of North Salt Lake appear twinkling on the horizon and within minutes begin to fill the darkness until they’re crowding in on both sides of the interstate. The time has come to cut the cord again. Signaling well in advance, I ease off the interstate, and Cash follows me a few blocks down a frontage road, until I pull over in the tiny lot of a power equipment rental joint, where we park on opposite sides.
By the time Trev wheels down the ramp, Cash and Dot are already awaiting us at the bottom. The night is cool, a touch of autumn in the thin desert air. Even perpetually underdressed Dot has her arms folded across her chest.
“Well,” she says.
I give Cash a nod on the sly, and we duck out in tandem, walking the fifty feet to the curb, where Cash leans against a flagpole, and I stuff my hands in my pocket. Off to the west across the interstate, a low flying jet descends, its wing lights flashing.
“So what’s wrong with him?” says Cash.
“MD.”
Cash considers the diagnosis, looking down at his duct-taped flip-flop, and shaking his head. “How bad is that?”
“Pretty bad.”
“How bad?”
“No telling, really. They can slow it down, but they can’t stop it.”
“Life’s a fucking class A bitch,” he says, his tone resolved more than bitter. “Seems like a hell of a nice kid. Funny. Smart.”
“He’s a peach,” I say. “And so is Dot. You’ve got a great kid there. She’s gonna grow into herself, you watch.”
He shakes his head and smiles sadly. “Well, then, maybe she can teach me a thing or two.”
Cash pushes off from the flagpole, and we begin drifting back toward the van.
“Thanks again, bro,” he says.
“My pleasure. And I mean that.”
We pull up halfway, in time to watch Dot lean down and give Trev a long, awkward kiss. Trev’s arms are sort of in the way. His head is reared back at a funny angle. But it’s not just him. Watching Dot bend down to him, tentatively, as though she’s afraid she might injure him, it strikes me that she isn’t as experienced as she’d have the world believe. When she stands upright after the kiss, she immediately folds her arms again.
“You’ve got my number,” she says, backpedaling toward the Skylark.
Cash and I shake hands.
“Be safe,” I say.
“Later, bro.”
The Skylark is already pulling out of the lot as Trev mounts the ramp and maneuvers himself into place. For the first time in days, I buckle him in without Dot’s assistance—crouching in back to wrangle the straps around the axle before ducking out and circling around to the passenger’s side to secure the front. I’m gonna miss that kid in more ways than one.
the hide-a-bed incident
Bob’s condo is off the Belt Route within rumbling distance of the airport. He occupies the bottom floor of a dirty gray duplex with a dead lawn. There is a wire reindeer out front listing badly to one side.
“Gotta be Blitzen,” I say.
“Welcome to Casa Bob,” says Trev, whirring up the walkway, “where every day is Christmas.”
I’m proud of Trev. He’s been surprisingly upbeat in the half hour since his good-bye kiss. Maybe because Dot’s texted him twice already.
At the front steps, a sturdy access ramp of three-quarter-inch plywood has been erected, with twin strips of wide-grip tape running parallel up the center. The apartment is dark, inside and out. Stationed on either side of the front door is a large ceramic planter with a dead plant in it.
I ring the bell and wait. Ten seconds pass. I ring it again, clear my throat, wait. Still nothing.
“Try knocking,” says Trev.
I rap on the door. We wait.
“Maybe he ran to the store,” I say, rapping again.
“At one a.m.?”
“He’s probably waiting up for us. So maybe he got thirsty or something.”
Trev fishes his phone out of his pouch and dials Bob. In a moment, we can hear the cell phone ringing from within. Then, faintly, a groan. I rap harder on the door. Another groan.
“Bob, you in there?” The phone is still ringing. Now I’m knocking like a cop, with my fist. “Bob, open the door!”
A third groan, and then Bob’s voice calling out something inaudible.
“What? ”
“Va doe if umucked!” Bob bellows.
“What did he say?”
Trev shrugs.
I press my ear to the door.
“Va doe if umucked!” Bob s
houts again.
“Something about the door,” says Trev.
“If umucked!” proclaims Bob.
“Try the door,” says Trev.
The door is unlocked. I push through, stepping into the darkened apartment. Before I can find a light, I hear Bob’s voice again, still a little muffled.
“Va mights to va veft ova doe.”
I snap on the overhead light, and there’s Bob mounting the sofa. His folding wheelchair is overturned halfway across the room. His good arm is wedged in the bowels of the couch, and his arm cast rests unnaturally against the side of his head. His face is buried between the couch cushions.
“What the hell?” says Trev, wheeling across the threshold.
I right Bob’s wheelchair and kneel to assist him, very carefully extracting his good arm from the depths of the sofa bed. Once his arm is clear, I rotate his body, until he’s looking up into my face. He smiles sheepishly and looks down toward his lap, which is soaked.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry about that. Think you can lift me back into the chair?”
The instant I heft him three inches off the sofa, he hoots like a barred owl, and his eyes begin to water. I ease him back down against the sofa, where he looks like he might pass out. All the color has drained from him.
“You’ve got to support the leg,” he says, gasping for breath. “The leg.”
This time, I get him under the leg cast with one arm and around the back and under the armpits with the other. I lift him slowly, looking down into his face for signs of discomfort. But for some grimacing and a few cringes, I manage to nest him in his chair without further incident.
“Thanks,” he says with a great sigh of relief.
“You okay?”
“I think so. Everything feels about the same. Face is kind of itchy.”
“What the hell were you doing, Dad?”
“Trying to fold out the hide-a-bed, make it up for you guys. Damned strap’s way down on the inside, behind the cushions, and I got caught leaning too far. The chair slid out from under me. Got stuck, couldn’t move.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know. What time is it?”
“One ten.”
“About four hours ago.”
“Four hours!” says Trev.
“Why didn’t you yell for your neighbor?” I say.
“He’s deaf.”
“Oh, right.”
“What happened to you?” Bob says to me.
“He hurt his neck in Missoula,” Trev says.
The apartment is dumpy but orderly. Despite the glaring overhead light and a menagerie of colors splashed about—from the pale blue carpet, to the dull yellow La-Z-Boy, to the custard-colored sofa bed—the place is dark. A murky fishbowl on the end table catches my eye. Inside, a lone tenant describes sluggish circles endlessly, his big mouth slowly opening and closing.
“That’s Mr. Baxter,” says Bob, following my gaze.
“Why do you call him Mr. Baxter?”
“I dunno,” he says. Wheeling in a half circle, he nearly takes me off at the knees with his clunky leg cast. “Ope. Sorry. Keep forgetting the damn thing’s there. Well, I better get out of these wet drawers.”
“You need help?” I say.
“Oh no. I can handle it.”
Bob tries to maneuver between Trev and me, but there’s no room. Trev backs up, I slide over. Bob runs over my foot on his way past.
“Ope,” he says. “Sorry about that. Say, maybe you could give me a hand with that hide-a-bed.”
“Got it,” I say.
“Welcome to Utah, fellas.”
“Thanks, Dad. Sorry you peed your pants.”
Bob rolls off into the bedroom and with considerable effort manages to shut the door. Almost immediately, there’s some bumbling with a stuck drawer, and something crashes to the floor.
“Nothing to worry about in here!” he calls out. “Bottle just fell off the bureau is all. It didn’t break—no biggie!”
I turn my attention to the hide-a-bed and start feeling around for the strap. “So what do you think?” I say, fishing around behind the couch cushions. “You glad we came?”
Before Trev can answer, his phone beeps, and he breaks into a wide grin. Another text. He cranes his neck and bows his back, then lowers his arm like a backhoe, scooping his phone out of the pouch. Hoisting the screen to face level, he squints as he reads the text.
I locate the hide-a-bed strap, give it a tug. The folded mattress rears up on its spring base. I kick out the legs and smooth the mattress and unfold the clean bedding as Trev struggles fiercely to manipulate his tiny keypad.
“Look at you, Mr. Text.”
“Texting is the shiz,” he says just as the phone slips from his grasp, careens off his knee, and scurries across the floor.
Circling the hide-a-bed, I stoop and retrieve the phone and hand it back to Trev. “You want me to type something?”
“Nah. I got it.” He raises the phone and begins the agonizing business all over again. It’s bad enough he doesn’t have a flip phone.
Bob soon reemerges in a cloud of aftershave, clad in dry khaki Dockers and the shirt I gave him this summer. Wheeling past me into the living room, where the hide-a-bed allows for only a narrow passage, he jostles the end table, setting the fishbowl to wobbling. The water heaves and laps up over the rim, but Mr. Baxter doesn’t seem to care. Nothing seems to stir Mr. Baxter. Even when Bob pauses to pepper a few precious flakes of krill into the water, Mr. Baxter just lets the food float on the surface. I’m guessing he’s bat-shit crazy from turning circles in that murky little bowl his whole life, and that he doesn’t care anymore whether he lives or dies.
“This is Mr. Baxter.”
“Yeah, we know,” says Trev.
Who can blame Bob for being nervous? He’s been riding the pine for years, waiting for this opportunity to get back in the game with Trev. How many buckets of chicken and crummy motel beds has he endured with the hope of arriving at this moment? How many red-eye flights from Sea-Tac on the heels of defeat, knowing that he’d gladly do it all again for the opportunity to redeem himself? Now Bob’s finally got that chance. What Bob doesn’t know is that he can relax. His son is in love, and next to that vast awakening, there’s nothing momentous about their reunion. Trev is willing to forgive anything as long as those texts keep coming.
“Hey, Dad,” he says, punching ponderously at his keypad, his head back. “You got anything to drink?”
“How about some root beer?”
“That’ll work.”
“Ben?”
“Sure, what the heck.”
Bob spins, clipping the hide-a-bed with his chair, wheels over my foot again, and bumps the end table again, sloshing Mr. Baxter around in his bowl.
“Tell you what,” I say. “Let me grab that. You two can play catch-up. How ’bout you, Bob? Root beer?”
“Why not?”
I retire to the kitchen and start searching the cabinets for glasses.
“So, who you texting?” I hear Bob say.
“Just a girl,” says Trev.
I locate the glasses, a bachelor’s assemblage, which includes a mason jar and a partially melted blue plastic tumbler.
“You mean like a girlfriend?” Bob says.
“Yeah, maybe. We haven’t really gotten that far.”
Bob’s next question is lost in the hum of the ice box as I’m greeted by an arctic blast of freezer-burned vapor. Excavating two bags of frozen peas, some hamburger, and a Lean Cuisine, I locate the ice near the back, buried beneath some link sausage and a turkey pot pie. The cubes in the half-empty tray have an opaque, shrunken aspect to them, and almost certainly they’ll taste of frozen hamburger. But at least they’re cold. Closing the freezer, I can hear Bob laughing.
“Well, that’s what it looked like, seriously,” says Trev.
“That’s bad,” Bob says. “I wish I could have seen it. What else? Tell me about Missoula.”
“Missoula. Oh man. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“Tell me everything.”
And as Trev begins telling his dad everything—Peaches, Elton, the Skylark, the Yeti, Scruggs, me streaking across the lot of the C’mon Inn, I linger in the kitchen, clinking the ice cubes in the glasses methodically, one at a time, refilling the tray, nice and level, clearing a spot among the frozen whatnot, reorganizing the goods as I go. When I can’t stall any longer, I uncap the warm root beer gradually, letting it hiss, watching it froth up jubilantly, as though it’s excited at finally being released.
the biggest pit in the world
Trev and I are are rudely awakened at eight in the morning by an alarm. Not the mindless bleating of a digital alarm clock but the frantic squealing of a twelve-volt fire alarm. Shooting upright on the hide-a-bed, I hear the unmistakable hiss of scalding oil, the clang of cast iron on linoleum. Then Bob.
“Ope! Uhhh—need an assist in here!”
I leap from the mattress, swing around the foot of the bed, past Mr. Baxter and into the kitchen, where black smoke billows from the range. An iron skillet is ablaze, a tongue of flames lapping at the hood. On the ground, another skillet smolders next to several broken eggs. Bob is in the middle of it all, clutching a spatula in his good hand. Even in the thick of the smoke, I can smell his spilled aftershave from last night. In a frenzy, he swings around to address me, nearly knocking me off my feet with his unwieldy cast. I sidle past him, snap a dish towel off the stove handle, wrap it around my hand, and dive in for the burning skillet. When I’ve got a firm hold of the handle, I swing the flaming skillet in a wide arc toward the sink, drop it in the basin, and slam the cold water on full throttle. The skillet chuffs and hisses like a steam engine as the flames fizzle and a new wave of smoke overwhelms the kitchen.
I snap off both burners, snatch the remaining skillet off the linoleum, and drop it in the sink with the other.