Craig got onto his hands and knees and laid adhesive tile squares on the floor of the tiny bathroom, cutting and fitting the pieces expertly. They were a speckled tan, and he looked into them a thousand miles. Alone like this, working carefully, Craig felt good. It was late in the day, and Mason would certainly stay a day or two. He had probably come up to sell the place. For some reason he remembered an afternoon standing with Jimmy in the Brands’ backyard, plucking the last garden tomatoes and throwing them at Frank and Mason up at his place, laughing and dodging the incoming. Memory, he thought, what is that good for? I’m fifty years old, and I’m on my knees in the Brands’ garage, and I don’t have anyplace better to be. “Oh my hell,” he said aloud, and heard the words. “You’re lonely.” I’ll put in a garden box with two-by-twelves, he thought. We’ve got the space. Marci won’t want to, but I can grow some tomatoes, even if the deer eat them. He took his time, and when he set in the last corner, it was almost dark, and the small piece of tile fit like a jewel, and he pressed it there with his hand and with the handle of his hammer until the seam disappeared.
TWO
Home
Mason Kirby had never been lost in his life, not even as a kid out of Oakpine in the real wilderness on backpacking trips or the like. Nor had he been lost in Europe, or in London, or in Alaska on a fishing trip, which was only business, or even drunk in college, or on one trip to South America, Caracas; and on that trip he became the go-to guy when it was time to find the small van that took the elite tour group around.
And now he pulled his plum Mercedes off the two-lane onto the gravel shoulder, and in the bland midday cloud cover and on the dry grass plain, he didn’t know the number of the route or if he was still going north or northeast or east. He could see in all four directions the flat grassy earth. He was lost. He stood out of the car and noted that there were small weeds able to work through the cracks in the old road. He’d been driving for four hours, which meant he was either in Nebraska or about to come right back to Denver. He went back and opened the trunk just to see again the tangible evidence of his decision. His clothes were laid in a fan on one side, and he smiled to see he’d brought his suit. Maybe he’d have a job interview. His beautiful leather Dopp kit, the gift from Elizabeth six, seven years ago, his valise, swollen with the papers concerning the pending sale of his firm, and the black shoe box, which he now lifted and opened to see the $21,000 stacked there. A shoe box. It was such a raw maneuver, bringing that cash. He didn’t need it, and in fact every time he’d had two or three thousand dollars cash in his wallet or in the console of his car, Elizabeth had said, What good thing can come of that? But he knew he’d gone to the bank and obtained all the hundreds in the zippered bag, not a tenth of what was in his account, so he’d have proof of his decision. Sell the firm, take a break, go. A shoe box; it was such a joke. He was so dramatic.
Again he scanned the horizon, not a hill, no smoke, not a clue. The sky was a seamless gray. He could turn on the GPS and know in a minute, but he hadn’t turned it on after the first week with this car. The woman giving directions spoke French. That was okay, but he disliked the world jumping at him that way: line line line, turn right, line line. Plus, he had never been lost, and now he knew he was, and he felt it in the top of his stomach, the way a kid would. He felt the gravity of Denver pale and fade, and yet there was no pull from anything else. He’d never been between things; maybe that was it.
He stood and felt the realtor’s letter in his sport coat pocket. Shirley Stiver, same class at the high school. His old house was in fact empty, the renters fled, and what to do? He could call her back from right here right now, assuming there was a satellite also lost above this place, and have it handled with four sentences, but no. He was lost, but he knew where he was going.
He thought of his BlackBerry but didn’t check it, because he knew not to. He’d learned well as a lawyer to leave it until it beckoned. He looked at the thing twice a day on principle: first and last. He’d made sure it was off and thrown it into the trunk. Done.
Back on the road, still lost, he thought that like everything else in his life, this would last ten minutes. But an hour later the terrain had shifted to shallow hills run with sage, and dropping down a short incline, he came into the hamlet of Garrell, the two churches, the auto parts, the Grocery Basket, the old Rexall drug store, and the Bargain Barn, which had been in a former day a department or furniture store, and at the far end of town two bars, the Wasatch and the Divide, which didn’t have a window in the front, even in the old painted red plank door. The two other license plates in the gravel parking were from Kansas. He hadn’t had a drink in the afternoon for ten years, but now he was dislocated, feeling more like a blank page than he could ever remember.