If I didn't get out of this house today, I was going to lose it. And I needed to flee before my father could corner me and rope me into doing the one chore that just might break my heart.
I rushed down to the garage and then stopped.
My father had beaten me down, and was there with his head under the hood of my rental car.
I stood there for a moment, jingling the keys in my hand. "Hey, uh, what are you doing?
But I knew exactly what he was doing. He'd won. He'd beat me. I remembered him pulling the same kind of stunt when I'd come home from tour seven years ago and wanted to sneak out to a party late at night. Rather than forbid me from leaving, my dad just disconnected my car battery saying he'd replace it 'once the good ones are back in stock at Chuck's shop.' I was stuck home for the remainder of that visit. It worked exactly as he'd planned.
But he never admitted that keeping me home was his goal, nor would he admit it now. So he muttered something about jokers and who they thought they were fooling, then pulled his head back out from under the hood. "Your lines are almost completely clogged."
"Ah, yeah. But it's a rentalm so that's really not my problem."
"I'm almost done with the flush."
"Dad, it's their job to deal with it. Not yours."
He turned and looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head. Then he swept his hand over to the neatly laid out parts and disconnected hoses and sort of shrugged like 'what can I do?' "Never leave a job unfinished," he intoned.
I pressed my lips together and sighed. Whenever I complained to Gid about my dad, he'd always say the same thing. "You're more like him than you realize."
Stubbornly refusing to let go of something until it worked the way you wanted it to?
I understood that all too well.
"Fine," I said, shoving my hands into my pockets.
"You're gonna be around later, right?" Dad asked me, wiping his hands on a rag.
I swallowed. If this were any other place in the world, I'd be able to say 'hell no' and leave it at that. But this was Crown Creek. This was my Dad's house, and so I had to say, "Probably."
I could see by the twitch at the corner of his eye that he didn't like that answer. "Got a lot of work ahead of us," he said, taking off his glasses and wiping them with a different rag. Of course he had rags assigned for specific purposes. "I could use the help."
I'd come down hoping I could slip out un-noticed. If I was gone, then there was no way my father could ask me to help clean out Gid's house with him. But he'd made certain I couldn't flee by disabling my car.
But maybe he hadn't won. I wasn't as dumb as I used to be. "Yeah, if I have the time, definitely," I said smoothly. "But I was going to run into town." I grinned and shrugged. "Looks like I"m going to have to walk, huh? I guess I could use the exercise but it's definitely going to take me longer."
My Dad put his glasses back on again and regarded me with a fierce stare. Gabe could almost match it in intensity but my father's had the advantage of profound disappointment in all your failings as a person. "Huh," he said. He paused, letting the silence stretch out, most likely hoping it'd start me squirming in shame. But when I didn't buckle, he blew air out of the side of his mouth and turned back to the car. "Then I guess I'll see you later," he said pointedly.
"Hope so!" I replied, clapping him on the back. Feeling flush with outsmarting him, I didn't even mind that I had a mile and there-quarters walk ahead of me along frozen country roads. If I was walking, that meant I wasn't down in Gid and Izzy's place with a trash bag, throwing out the remnants of his life.
Izzy was moving off the property now, into a little trailer near where the cult-people lived. My dad had told her she could stay, but the idea of living with the memories of Gideon was too much for her fragile nature, and she'd declined. Which meant that now all of Gid's instruments and equipment were being packed up in boxes. Izzy had mentioned maybe donating them to the school in his memory and the thought was nice but my mind rebelled at the idea of Gideon's memory being let loose, formless into the world rather than staying tightly contained in the place where he'd lived.
I had no right. I knew that. I wasn't so much of an asshole that I couldn't see that it was Izzy's choice to do with this stuff what she wanted. She was the one who had spent half her life with the uncle I'd barely seen in two years. But a hurt kind of anger, a childish sense of unfairness, was nipping at the edge of my rational mind. I didn't want to see him do it. I didn't want to help him do it. And I knew if I hung around the house there would be no way to avoid it. So I left the house.
Walking into town was like playing peekaboo with the creek. I left it at my parents' house, heading out along our road only to find it again as it dove under Davy's Bridge, the first of the three spans over it. Then it left me as it hooked out in a wide loop before making another sharp turn out there by the cult people and heading straight into town. I found it again, narrowed within cement banks, as the first scrappy stores that clung to the outskirts of town came into view.
I huffed out a visible puff of breath. My coat was too thin for this kind of damp cold. It was made for style, not for weather and right now the smell of snow was in the air. I could see it up there, the sky was fuzzy with it, but nothing was falling yet. Tonight it would, for sure.
The town of Crown Creek was really little more than a glorified intersection - which the locals loftily called 'The Four Corners.' Here the creek narrowed some more before taking a steep dive over three small series of rapids, baby waterfalls, but falls all the same. These falls were why the town had sprung up out here in the first place. The shells of old flour mills clung to the banks of those little falls, their grinding wheels long since rotted away,. They were old and worn and now looked like part of the landscape.
In the summer the falls would be roaring, but ice was already starting to freeze the creek into silence. A car went by, the tires noisy on the wet pavement, but otherwise everything was quiet.
It had been a long time since I had heard this kind of quiet.
I passed a few shops. A sad little pet store with a sleeping cat in the window that looked like it had given up on the idea of adoption and made its home right there. A shuttered art gallery. A dollar store.
Nothing I needed.
At the corner of Mill Street, I looked in on an empty storefront, the only thing left inside was a fallen over chair in the very center of the space. There was music leaking out of the building next to it and I did a double take to see a bar in front of me.
I turned in a slow circle, uncertain if I had somehow lost my bearings. I didn't remember a bar being at this intersection. Not that the name was much to go my. Crown Tavern. Everything around here was Crown this, Royal that. Even my family name fit with the theme of the area.
Crown Tavern. Slowly, the name brought up a faint memory of kids in T-ball uniforms. The kids with normal childhoods, the ones who didn't always know exactly what they wanted from the moment they could speak. This bar must have always been here and I was just too young to go inside.
I was old enough now.
I pushed my way inside. It felt overwarm after my freezing walk and I immediately shed my jacket. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air, although smoking indoors had been banned for ages now. It seemed to be seeping out of the walls.