I knew. I mean, I didn’t know know but I knew there was something and I knew I’d never quite asked for the full story.

I’m sitting on the table, Trent on the bench, leaning back against me as I stroke his hair. We’re facing yet another giant tree, both watching it.

“I really thought I’d told you all that,” he says.

“Not like that. Not as a whole story,” I say. “I knew the bits and pieces, but I didn’t know the story.”

Trent sighs, tilts his head back, looks up at me.

“So you know the rest, right?” he asks. “Dad pressed charges, Mom sided with his version of events. Eli sided with me but wouldn’t testify, I think because he knew he was going back there no matter what he did.”

I bite my lip and look away. I’ve learned my lesson not to say bad things about Trent’s family, but Jesus Christ do I want to right now. Hell, I want to drive back to Low Valley, dig up Eli’s body, and feed it to the dogs.

I want to find his old house, the trailer, and fucking set fire to it. I want to stop payments to Gwen’s assisted living home and let them kick her out onto the streets.

Trent could never do any of that. Somehow, he came out of there the way he is, fucking kind and gentle and caring despite everything, but I could fucking do it. I could fucking do it to all of them.

“But I got lucky with a judge who took several years of domestic violence calls as evidence, and gave me three years of parole instead of sending me to prison,” he says. “I moved out, stayed with friends in a fucking filthy apartment where the rats ate the cockroaches. Got my GED. Became a bouncer, picked up a guitar, and you know the rest.”

I kiss the top of his head, because the rest isn’t simple either but it’s the part of the story I know. A couple years later, Stan finally got into a drunken fight with the wrong guy and died in a parking lot. Eli did the shit that he did, and despite fucking everything, as soon as he could afford it Trent paid for his mom to live where she does.

“I’m glad I didn’t know that story before I met your mom,” I say quietly.

“Now you know why I don’t care that she doesn’t like you,” he says, his voice rumbling through my body. “She’s got absolutely shit judgement. Fuck, it’s probably a good sign that she doesn’t like you.”

We sit there. I run my hands through his hair, and neither of us says anything. I’m not sure there’s anything left to say, but I can tell that right here, right now, Trent’s at peace for once.

Everything’s not fixed. He’s not fixed and I’m not fixed. Someday his mom’s going to die, too, and something like this will happen all over again, but that time I won’t fuck it up. He puts out my fires — literally — and I put out his, and it’s the way it’s been for a long time and the way it’s going to be.

“Want to keep walking and looking at trees?” he finally asks.

I kiss the top of his head one more time, and for a split second, I thank every deity I can think of for this moment.

“Of course,” I say.

* * *

The next day, we drive the two hours to LAX and fly from there rather than deal with the Bakersfield airport. Trent takes his rental car back, puts his luggage into mine and climbs in.

As I drive south, out of Bakersfield, he’s oddly quiet.

“How much time have we got?” he suddenly asks.

“Before we need to be at the airport?”

“Yeah.”

“Three hours.”

There’s a long, long pause. I glance over and he’s looking out the window, so I take one hand off the wheel and put it on his.

“Would you mind driving through Low Valley?” he suddenly asks. “It’s on the way.”

“I can do that,” I say. “Why?”

“Because I want to know it’s the last time I’ll ever see it,” he says. “Eli’s gone, my dad’s gone, my mom is... how she is, and I’ve got no fucking reason to ever go back, but I kind of want to see it one last time, just to say good fucking riddance.”

I get it. I go back to Madison, Wisconsin every so often to play shows, and sometimes I walk around, remembering being a teenage runaway and living half on the streets, half on the floors of older punks, anyone who would give me shelter for a night. And if I think I could never go back, I might.

He only speaks to give me directions. All the roads here are flat, straight, and dusty; all the corners ninety-degree angles ruled only by stop signs. If it weren’t for the smog and the golden glow of the air itself, I’d be able to see forever.

And then, suddenly, a green sign on the side of a two-lane road announces LOW VALLEY, Population 13,093, even though nothing else changes. One side of the road is dusty and fallow, the other has low green plants baking in the sun.

“Here we are,” Trent says.

“Where to now?”

“There’s not much to see,” he says, but we drive anyway: past a small high school with a single athletic field, past a few trailer parks, past low-slung abandoned houses. Past two blocks of downtown, where half the storefronts are boarded up, a couple are tattoo shops, and only one seems to be open and selling anything.

I think it’s about what I expected from what he told me, but it’s so odd to suddenly be here, in the exact place that Trent’s hated for as long as I’ve known him.

“Has it changed?” I ask as we roll past cracked tan stucco, an abandoned gas station.

“Not really,” he says. “I got busted once by the owner for stealing gum from that store. Guy nearly broke my arm. Back behind there is the lot where we used to skateboard, though there were always a couple of us sharing one board.”

I look over and he cracks a smile, just barely.

“Adam Laredo was a fucking skateboard hog,” he says. “Wonder what happened to that kid. Right there’s where I got this fucking awful dragon tattoo, and I’m probably lucky I didn’t get hepatitis, too.”

Then it’s over. It’s not a big town and we just hit the end, from dried-out buildings to the dried-out fields. For some reason, I pull off the road and park.

“What, you want more?” Trent asks.

I turn my head, look through the car’s rear window.

“You’re not kinda sad to leave it behind?”

“Not even some,” he says. “This place gave me the worst years of my life.”

I reach over and take his hand, leaning against the headrest of the front seat.

“Yeah, but it made you who you are now,” I say. “Maybe I should be a little more grateful to Low Valley.”

Trent laces his fingers through mine, squeezes hard, grins.

“I’d much rather think about the future, Darce,” he says. “Maybe this place ended up bringing me to you, but maybe I’d have gotten here anyway. And what’s important is that I got to you and you got to me, right?”

I think of Wisconsin snow drifts, of freezing my ass off for days at a time, and I think of a too-hot trailer filled with shouting, and then I think: fuck all that.

“Right,” I say, smiling. “Fuck Low Valley. I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says, and we kiss as the hot dust swirls around the car, nearly obliterating our view of Low Valley behind us.