4
Travis
Abby and I had made pretty good progress on the road so far, getting to within about an hour of Canon after about two hours on the road. She had barely said three words to me since we got in the car. Instead she had slipped her earbuds in to listen to music while she frantically tapped away on her phone, chatting with someone and smiling along the way.
Finding a radio station once we got close to Canon was nearly impossible because of the mountains surrounding the area. Since I hadn’t bothered to attach my phone to the car, I couldn’t play any music I might like along the way, which left me to just get lost in my thoughts as I drove along. I took in the scenery as we went along the highway and was quickly reminded of how beautiful it was around here. The sun was still shining brightly, the trees looked beautiful, and the area around Canon was much more rural than what I had become accustomed to over the last several years.
We hadn’t been back to Canon for a while to see my mom. In fact, it had been years since I had been here at all. Normally she would just get frustrated and come to see us in Ridgefield, constantly chiding me because I never came to see her. I certainly never went there to see my dad or anyone else for that matter. My parents had split up when I was seventeen, and even though they lived in the same town, I never saw him much, and even less after I left for college. I saw him once before Abby was born, and then talked to him on the phone after her birth, though it was more of a one-sided, drunken argument and chastising from him about how I threw my life away getting some girl pregnant. After that, I never spoke to him again, and never really wanted to.
My daydreaming continued on for a while, and before I knew it, I saw the sign for the exit for Canon and realized I had never called my mother to let her know we were coming. It was getting close to six, which meant she wasn’t at home anymore and was already down at her place watching over everything for the dinner crowd. She had been running that restaurant for as long as I could remember, a business she inherited from her father and that she had operated with great pride, despite having to throw my father out of there more than once for drinking too much or getting cozy with one of the new waitresses. That’s what eventually let her come to her senses and toss him out on his ear, permanently.
I had spent more than enough of my life at The Homestead. I spent hours there waiting for her while she worked and worked there as a busboy in high school. I didn’t have much of a desire to go there at all tonight. I was tired, my leg hurt, my head hurt, and I didn’t want to run into any old high school folks that I didn’t want to see anyway.
“Dad,” Abby said to me as she pulled the earbuds from her ears, “does Grandma know we’re coming?”
“No, not really,” I said to her as I turned off the exit ramp and headed out towards my mom’s house on Wood Place.
“Then why are we going to her house? You know she won’t be there. Let’s just go to the restaurant.”
“Honey,” I sighed, “I’ve been driving for three hours, and I’m tired. I don’t feel like dealing with the dinner crowd at the Homestead and trying to get Grandma’s attention. We’ll just go to the house, go in, and call her from there. She won’t mind.”
Wood Place was not far from the exit, and it was moments before we were pulling into the gravel driveway. The motion lights I had told her to get flipped on as we pulled in and I could hear Pee Wee, her St. Bernard, barking inside as soon as he heard us.
Abby bounded out of the car before the engine was off and scurried up the porch steps to the front door. I was barely out of the car, stretching my sore leg after the drive, and opening the trunk to get the bags when I saw the front door was open and Abby was inside. I didn’t realize she was tall enough now to reach the broken shingle near the front door where my mom hid the spare key. She was growing up way too fast.
I grabbed our bags from the trunk and lumbered up the front steps of the porch and through the front doorway. The house looked and smelled the same as it did since the last time I was here, when Abby was a much smaller girl that needed me to carry her up the staircase to go to sleep. All the details were still the same, including the pictures in the hallway, the framed cross-stitch in the living room, and the old percolator that she refused to give up to make her coffee in the morning.
I dropped the bags in the hallway and sat down on the old leather couch in the living room and looked around. I flipped the light on next to the couch to brighten things up a bit, though the room was still a bit dark from the wood paneling in the room that Mom refused to replace. In a flash, Abby came racing around the corner with a giant, slobbering Pee Wee behind her. Abby threw herself onto the couch next to me, and Pee Wee immediately jumped up between us, practically knocking me off the couch with his head as he smiled a slobbering smile at me.
Abby praised him and petted him for a bit before he jumped down and lay on the floor in front of us. I was glad for the extra space and stretched out my legs a bit in front of me.
“Okay, let’s go see Grandma,” Abby said as she jumped up off the couch.
“I thought we already decided this,” I told her, resisting her futile attempts to pull me up off the couch. “Let’s just relax here and see her later.”
“Well if you don’t want to go, that’s fine. I can walk down there myself.”
Abby started walking towards the front door.
“Hold it,” I shouted. Abby spun around on her heels and put her hands on her hips, immediately reminding me of the way her mother used to do the same thing.
“What?” she said as if she was itching for an argument.
“You’re not walking there alone. It’s getting dark.”
“Dad, you can’t be serious,” she said to me incredulously. “I’m not a little kid anymore, and the restaurant is only a few blocks away. Besides, we’re in Canon. They’ve already started rolling up the sidewalks.”
She was, of course, right on all those points, and I didn’t really feel like arguing with her.
“Fine, go, but make sure you have your phone with you,” I told her, trying to sound as parental as possible.
“Thanks, Dad!” Abby yelled as she was out the door and down the porch steps.
I kicked back on the couch, swinging my sore leg up, and kicked my boots off onto the floor. I put my left arm over my eyes while my right dangled down on the floor and gently scratched behind Pee Wee’s ear as we both rested. I closed my eyes, trying not to think too hard about anything at all – not the past, present, or future – and hoped I could get some peaceful sleep.