“Dooon’t gooo! Nooo!”
Kyle threw his suitcase into the back seat of the van. Inside the house, Caroline was still wailing. Not the top-of-her-lungs princess-singing type of wailing she often did. It was an end-of-the-world soul-wrenching wail that Kyle hadn’t heard her make in ages. An hour of cuddling and attempts at tickling and diverting with Amazonia singalong videos had not managed to calm her down. In the end, his dad had picked her up, holding her stiff body against his chest, and told Kyle to go. There had been an uneasiness to his expression as well, but before Kyle could ask about it, Caroline had started to thrash and her crying ratcheted up another couple decibels and Kyle had only been able to ignore the helplessness that rattled through him as he headed for the garage.
It was later than he’d meant to leave. Caroline’s meltdown had been unexpected. He’d told her several times over the past week that he was going to go on a short trip. They’d checked the maps on his phone so she could see where Richmond was. She’d seemed fine with it.
And then, that afternoon, as she’d drowned her grilled cheese sandwich in ketchup, he’d asked her what she was going to do with Grandpa while Kyle was away, and she’d stared up at him with eyes like saucers.
“Where are you going?” she’d asked.
“To Richmond, remember?”
“Why?”
“I’m going to see some people about getting a new job.”
“You’re going to leave?” Caroline’s eyes had gotten impossibly wider, and Kyle could see now where he’d made the fatal error.
“For a few days . . .”
But that was as far as he got, because the waterworks had sprung a leak and Caroline had started crying so loudly that Kyle’s dad, dead asleep upstairs after three overnight shifts in a row, had come running downstairs in his boxers and a stretched-out T-shirt. He’d looked terrified at the unholy sound coming from his granddaughter’s heaving chest.
Kyle’s knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel and pulled onto the highway. Guilt gnawed at him, and he didn’t like it. It felt like everyone around him had decided to amp up the drama in his life to eleven. Caroline’s tear-stained face and the way she’d clung to him shook him. She was the most important person in his life; to be responsible for the level of distress she’d shown ate at him as he left Red Creek behind.
Compared to the scene at home, the interior of the van was tomblike in its silence. The truth was the muffler was hanging on by a thread, and most of the insulation that kept out the road noise had given up the ghost years ago, not to mention there were places where rust was eating holes from the outside in. Its various roars and grinding sounds filled his head, softening the remembered edges of his daughter’s howling. If he got this job, he thought, or any job, he was going to put down the first and last month’s rent on a place for him and Caroline, and then he would ask Ben to find him the cheapest car available that didn’t sound like the inside of a lawn mower.
A few hours into his drive, he stopped for gas. He added better gas mileage to his automotive wish list for Ben, although it would probably be impossible to find anything not built to haul livestock or large groups of schoolchildren that would get worse mileage than the van. He grabbed a coffee and a dubious-looking egg-salad sandwich from the gas station. He tried not to think that if everyone had gone with the plan he’d laid out, his dinner would have been much more appealing, somewhere romantic in Richmond with Adam.
He hadn’t heard from Adam in over a week. It was unreasonable for him to be so put out when Kyle needed to do this. Finding a new job was not optional, and if the best available job was six hours away, well, that was outside Kyle’s control.
That particular argument led Kyle in circles like it had all week. The morning after the graduation, he’d told himself that it had all been a misunderstanding. He’d called, but all his calls had gone to voice mail, and the longer the silence went on, Kyle realized that things with Adam had gone really wrong. Kyle wasn’t proud of some of what he’d said in his third and final voice mail. A week later, he still couldn’t see how he could have handled telling Adam about the call from Richmond any better.
He checked his phone before heading off again. There was a message from his dad.
Everything’s good. We watched cartoons, colored, and ate dinner.
If you can, call Caroline before she goes to bed.
He checked the time. It was nearly seven thirty; Caroline’s bedtime, unless she managed to negotiate extra time out of her grandfather. Kyle wouldn’t put it past his daughter, but he thought he’d give his dad a little credit and at least pretend like he should call sooner rather than later. He peeled the cellophane off the egg-salad sandwich while the phone rang. His dad picked up the call quickly and got Caroline on the line with minimal fuss.
“Hey, Bean,” Kyle said.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said without much enthusiasm.
“Are you having a good time with Grandpa?” There was a pause. Kyle imagined her shrugging. He tried again. “I hear you watched cartoons.”
“Yeah.”
“Did Grandpa make you dinner?”
“It was the lasagna that you told him to make. I said I wanted chicken fingers, but he said we had to have what you made. I didn’t like it. The cheese was chewy.”
Man. His kid had sulking skills beyond her years. They were not entirely unlike her former first-grade teacher’s. Maybe they were on the curriculum.
“Bean, are you mad at me?” he asked.
“No.” There was a sigh that said otherwise. At least Caroline was talking to him. Silent treatment must be covered in second grade.
“Are you mad that I didn’t take you with me on this trip?”
“No.”
“Are you mad because Grandpa didn’t make chicken fingers for dinner like you wanted?”
“Daddy, when are you coming home?”
“I’ll be back on Friday.” They’d been through this. It had been part of the explanation he’d given her along with the geography lesson about where he was going. “It’s only two sleeps. You’re going to go to bed soon, and then tomorrow you’re going to spend the day with Grandpa, and then you’re going to go to bed, and then when you wake up in the morning, I’ll be there.”
“Can’t you come home now?” There was a wobble in her voice, and he really didn’t want her to start crying all over again, especially when his dad would be stuck cleaning up the mess.
“No, Bean, I have to go see some people about a job, so I can’t come home tonight. But as soon as it’s done I’m going to drive back home as fast as I can.”
“But what if the people want you to stay?”
Her question struck him as weird. In all the talking and rehearsing they’d done, Caroline hadn’t expressed any interest in the reasons for his trip, only that he was going somewhere.
“Like if they want to give me a job?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Bean, I’d still come back.”
“To Grandpa’s?”
“Of course.” Did she think he wouldn’t?
“To stay forever?” Her voice ticked up hopefully.
Kyle thought about sleeping down the hall from his dad forever.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “If we had to move to Richmond, we’d get our own place like we had in Seattle, remember?”
“Can Grandpa come too?”
“I think Grandpa would want to stay in Red Creek. But he could come visit lots.” He winced. Adam hadn’t thought much of that offered compromise. Kyle wasn’t sure if it would work for his father either.
“Okay,” Caroline said.
“So are we good, Bean?”
“Grandpa wants to talk to you.” There was shuffling. Kyle heard his dad tell Caroline to go brush her teeth, followed by Caroline whining, and then, clearly, he said, “Hello?”
“Hi,” Kyle said. “Everything okay now?”
“I think so. I’ll let her negotiate up to three books, and we should be fine.”
“Don’t let her pick the Amazonia Christmas one. It’s got more words per page than any kid’s book has a right to have.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” His dad chuckled.
“Did she really think I wouldn’t come back?”
His father let out a dad sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe. She knows this could mean a change, and there have been a lot of those lately.” His voice was pointed, and longer tendrils of guilt wrapped around Kyle’s stomach. His dad had been mostly silent on the topic of the trip to Richmond, which had been almost as bad as Adam going nuclear over it. Kyle was developing new capabilities in disappointing people, even while doing what was best.
“I should go check on the teeth brushing,” his dad said. “Call us tomorrow before you drive home.”
“You bet!” Kyle hung up, but stared at the phone for a second. He imagined his dad, herding Caroline to bed, negotiating pajamas, stories, and glasses of water. He scrolled through his call history. Several calls down from the one he’d just ended were five calls to Adam. They had all been unanswered. It hurt, how completely he’d been shut out, and he resented that Adam’s phone would have let him know how many times Kyle had called, a digital record of Kyle’s pointless efforts to defend himself.
He sighed and finished his sandwich, said a silent prayer that it had been properly refrigerated throughout its life at the gas station, then put his key in the van’s ignition and turned.
Nothing happened.
Kyle’s heart dropped. He turned the key again. There was a grinding cough, and then nothing again. He stared at his hand below the steering wheel, watching the movement as he turned the key again, to make sure he was doing it right, turning the key far enough. He was.
“Come on,” he said, over and over, whispering encouragement to the van. This was Adam’s fault too. If he had only listened, they would have come together, and in Adam’s car, and this wouldn’t be happening now.
“Come on, you piece of junk!” Kyle yelled. There was another cough, a metallic shriek followed by an unpleasant grinding, and then the van hiccupped into tenuous life.
“Oh, thank you.” Kyle heaved out a big breath. “I’m sorry. You’re not a piece of junk.” He patted the steering wheel. The van coughed out an ugly black cloud of smoke from its exhaust.
“I know. We’ll get Ben to look at that when we get home.” He headed back out onto the highway.
An hour from Richmond, Kyle resolved to enjoy himself. He was doing what he needed to do, like he’d been doing for months, and even for years. There was no sense dwelling on what couldn’t be fixed right now. If he was the only one who appreciated what his responsibilities meant, it was just as well he was on his own.
The van’s radio decided to work, and he turned the volume all the way up. The speakers were tinny, but Kyle sang along at the top of his lungs to every song he knew. As he approached the city limits, he rolled his windows down. Night air blew across his face.
When was the last time he’d been alone? Completely alone, with no child, no father, no clients in his ear? Months. Before Olivia had died, when there had still been someone to tag team parental duties with. People were so worried that he was alone now, but the truth was he hadn’t been alone since the police had come to his door. At the time, the idea of being by himself had been terrifying. Now, months later, in a different state on a different day, the idea that he was truly alone was exciting.
The hotel was a roadside place with free breakfast in the morning, but as he let himself into his room, it felt like a castle. There were two double beds set close together, and Kyle felt unbridled glee that he got to pick which one he was going to sleep in. He intentionally took up space on the other bed too, spreading out the things in his small overnight bag, and then the papers and pictures he’d brought in his portfolio.
It was late, but he stripped out of his clothes and hopped into the shower. He took the longest, hottest shower he could remember. He made a point of not remembering the shower at Adam’s, the night after their first date, and besides, that had been a different kind of hot, the kind of hot he was not going to think about. He let the water pour over him until he was pink and flushed, amazed when little fists didn’t bang on the bathroom door, and a little voice didn’t ask if she could watch a movie or play a game or have a snack.
He stayed up later than he should have, considering he had a job interview in the morning. The idea of enforcing a bedtime seemed cruel, so instead he sat, propped up by the pillows from both beds, watching an action movie that he would have been nervous to watch at home, even if Caroline was supposed to be asleep, because he never knew when she’d come tumbling down the stairs to tell him she’d had a bad dream.
It was well after midnight by the time he turned the TV off. He slid down under the sheets, and spread out until he star-fished across the mattress. He pointed his toes, just to claim that extra inch. He closed his eyes and sighed, snug and relaxed.
An hour later, he was still awake, staring at the small light of a smoke alarm on the hotel room ceiling. The blankets were scratchy and if he didn’t cover his head he was freezing in bed, but if he did cover his head, then he couldn’t breathe. This was Adam’s fault too, he decided. If they’d come together, then Kyle could have used Adam’s body heat to stay comfortable.
He sighed, watching the little red light, wondering if it ever blinked. He wondered if Caroline was asleep. He wondered if his dad had stuck to the three-story limit.
He wondered why Rebecca hadn’t called.
She must know that the relationship was over, and yet she hadn’t come through on her promise if Kyle broke her brother’s heart. He was prepared to debate who was the heartbreaker in this case, but the fact remained that there had been not a single call from Rebecca, not a single ambush in a public space. He had the uneasy idea that she might be lurking outside his hotel window, waiting for him to fall asleep so she could launch her devious revenge plan.
He rolled over and, despite the relative darkness, stared at the empty space in the bed beside him. Adam should have been there. If he’d simply listened to Kyle and seen it from his perspective, he would have been there. Kyle had been honest. There had been no false pretenses. Adam knew all the baggage he came with. Kyle hadn’t led him on with promises of domestic bliss and picket fences, while plotting to abandon him once things were getting good.
And things had been getting good. Really good. He even found Adam’s emotional constipation endearing, most of the time. The way Adam touched him, the way he crowded into Kyle’s space at the slightest invitation, they said Adam felt a lot more than he was able to say. Kyle wondered if, maybe, in their little private hot mess club with its membership of two, Adam wasn’t the bigger mess after all, as well as the hotter party. It seemed unfair that he would get all the accolades, but Kyle liked having a goal to work toward.
He reached for his phone on the bedside table, since apparently he wasn’t sleeping. The light from the screen as he turned it on made him squint in the dark of the room. He stared at his unanswered calls to Adam again, then flipped through their text messages, both the ones that Kyle had sent in the last week, and the ones they had traded before.
They were so very bad at words. Kyle used too many and Adam too few, and so much of their relationship seemed to hang on poorly punctuated digital banter with a character limit. Kyle missed the way Adam’s nose scrunched up when he was trying to put the words together to explain his emotions.
Can’t sleep. You should have come. I miss you.
Kyle reviewed the words he had typed on the phone and then deleted them. Sending that now, six hours away and in the middle of the night, wouldn’t resolve anything. He thought of the night he’d lost his job, of the way he’d hesitated to call Adam, and how much it had helped when he had. Maybe Adam wouldn’t mind so much if he called. Maybe Kyle would wake him up, and Adam would be too close to sleep to remember he wasn’t taking Kyle’s calls.
He held the phone for a minute longer, and his nerve failed him. Maybe he’d try in the morning.
He didn’t feel rested when his alarm went off in the morning. There was a new text message from his dad, showing a picture of Caroline in her pajamas at the table in the kitchen, with strawberry yogurt smeared across her face.
Good morning
Kyle texted back a reply. He frowned at the screen, reconsidering his plan to text Adam. In the light of day, he couldn’t think of a decent opening line.
Kyle decided to skip the free hotel breakfast in favor of stopping to eat downtown, closer to where his interview would be. The coffee shop he found was big and spacious, with stainless steel chairs and tables. A far cry from the homey feel at Rebecca’s, or the well-worn hipster vibe at that shoe store/ice cream place where he and Adam had gone, but it would do.
Kyle sat with his coffee and muffin and tried to picture that this might be his coffee shop, if he moved to Richmond. There were two girls working behind the counter, young enough to be working a summer job. They chatted with each other, but didn’t acknowledge the customers beyond taking and filling their orders. No regular customers then, at least not at this time of the morning. He wondered where locals got their breakfast. Was there an area with small businesses who needed community events to remind shoppers that they were still there?
As he sipped his coffee and flipped through his phone, a woman burst through the front door. She hurried through the shop and made her way behind the counter.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said to the girls as she disappeared into a back room, returning a few seconds later, an apron tied around her waist. “Daycare sent Nathan home yesterday afternoon. They said he had a fever and they won’t let him come back until it’s been down for twenty-four hours, and then I couldn’t find anyone to take him this morning. I called everyone I know.” She smoothed a hand over her hair, which frizzed out of its elastic.
The two other girls appeared uninterested. Kyle was interested though. Was that something daycares did? Would he have to worry about that if he and Caroline lived here? He wanted to know what had happened, but the woman didn’t elaborate. She just tightened her apron strings and collected empty mugs. Kyle smiled as she approached. She frowned a little, then smiled too, before she collected another mug from the table beside him and went behind the counter. Kyle waited for her to return so he could ask her what had happened next, but she didn’t reappear.
Once he’d finished his breakfast, Kyle went for a walk toward the beach, still thinking about the woman and her son.
“I called everyone I know.”
He knew no one. If he had been in that situation, he would have had no one to call in Richmond. That would change; few people were immune to the Fenton charm. He’d build a new network of friends who would look after each other. It would be harder though. A lot of his friends in Seattle were people he knew from school, or Olivia’s friends that she’d known before they’d met. In Red Creek, that famous community his dad had mentioned had been there for them, whether Kyle wanted to admit it or not. Here, he’d have to start from scratch, and he’d still be an anomaly, the young single dad who made people stare and wonder in a way that made him itch.
“I’m your family.” His dad had said that. Kyle had a sinking feeling that it, like so many things in his life, was one of those little nuggets of wisdom that would later turn out to be so important.
“You’re so scared of realizing that this town is where you need to be that you’d pack up everything and move to a place where you have nothing and you’re completely alone.”
By the time Adam had said that, Kyle had hardly been listening anymore. All he’d been able to see was the angry hurt on Adam’s face that had fired his own confusion over how the conversation had gone so wrong. He’d heard it as an accusation, and had focused on defending what he felt he had to do. But what if Adam had been right?
Kyle tried not to be discouraged as he took the long route back to the van. The city was pretty. There was a playground near the waterfront that Caroline would like. He had another moment of anxiety when the van struggled to cough back to life, but they got rolling eventually.
He was a little early for his appointment, and sat in his car, considering his options. He didn’t have to go in. He could turn the van around, and he’d be back in Red Creek by midafternoon. He could spend the afternoon going cross-eyed while watching Princess Amazonia with Caroline for the millionth time, while he composed a letter-perfect apology to Adam for not understanding what he’d been trying to say. Then Adam would stumble through his own apology for overreacting, and it would all be okay again.
Except Kyle would still be unemployed. Still relying on his father for everything, with no solution in sight. Would cuddles with the Bean and make-up sex with Adam be enough when the cobwebs started gathering in his bank account? And how would he explain that he’d walked away from the most prospective of jobs, one he’d already driven six hours to get to?
He stared across the street at the building he was supposed to be entering soon. The charity was another youth-focused group, like the one he’d worked for with Shannon. This one worked with autistic children, sending them to summer camps and organizing peer-to-peer support events for parents and families. Shannon said she knew the director well and that she was sure Kyle would get along with him too.
A receptionist greeted him at the office. She was older, maybe fifty. It was a huge relief to Kyle when he gave her his name and she nodded like she was expecting him. He took a seat and waited, trying not to fidget.
“Is this for an interview?” the receptionist whispered, like that information might be secret. Kyle shrugged.
“More like a conversation about whether an interview might be possible,” he said. The receptionist nodded in understanding and then stood. She disappeared behind a large unit of shelves, then reappeared with a stack of brochures and papers, and handed them to Kyle.
“In case you want to study,” she said.
Kyle leafed through what she’d given him. There were a number of brochures that he’d also found on the charity’s website, but beneath those brochures were newsletters and donor updates that he hadn’t seen. He read the first one. It was a request for donations, and it had words like mission and advocate and outcomes. They tickled a dusty part of his brain, a little area that hadn’t been used in years. He remembered these. Remembered the spin they had used to pitch campaigns to donors and sponsors, the buzzwords that made people feel that sense of immediacy and pull out their checkbooks. Kyle had watched Shannon work the room at party after party, drawing on people’s sympathies until it seemed like their only option was to make a donation. The party circuit had been exhausting, but knowing that the work the charity was doing made a difference had been rewarding from his first day on the job. Night after night, he had stayed up late, proofing another grant application, licking envelopes, or figuring out why the email to past donors had gone to the entire mailing list instead.
He had done it before. He could do it again.
As he read, Kyle felt himself slide into the groove. He could be successful with this organization. He knew how to prioritize and how to pitch. This charity was smaller; they would have to go farther with less, including their staff. He came with past experience and a work ethic that had kept his business running for years. With enough hard work, he could make himself indispensable. It would be a lot to take on, but he could do it.
His phone rang. It was a local number from Red Creek he didn’t recognize. Maybe the café? Rebecca finally calling for payback?
“Kyle?” An older man in a gray polo shirt stood by the reception desk. Kyle slipped the phone back into his pocket and rose to greet him.
“Yes?” The word was less confident than he would have liked. He straightened, thinking of the letters and the fundraisers and the reasons he was here. “Yes. Hi. Kyle Fenton.” He walked forward, putting out his hand. The other man took it.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Robert,” he said. “We spoke on the phone. Thanks for coming down. Shannon had great things to say about you.”
“Glad to hear it.” Suddenly, Kyle felt decisive, for the first time in months. For the first time since Olivia had died, and maybe even before that, he knew what he was going to do next.