Mitch parked his old Ranger in front of the garage door and shifted the clutch to first, killed the ignition. His e-brake had gone slack and this worried him: a couple months ago his son’s Taurus rolled down the driveway and butted up to a tree across the road. It could have been a mess but Mitch was awake in the bleeding hours – first guy out of bed on the whole street, on his way to the mill – to wake Luke before anything went south.
Nobody had left any lights on for him but he’d grown used to this kind of inconsideration. He eased himself from the Ranger, imagined his muscles unfolding like big ropes. Everything was the colour of ink. The sun teased behind the Rockies, gave tungsten outlines to their silhouettes. Invermere’s streets were quiet save a herd of deer plucking crabapples from a neighbour’s tree. Mitch knew guys who’d rather blare a hollowpoint into a deer than let it eat their fruit, and why those guys lived in the Kootenay Valley he couldn’t say. They might as well head east, leave B.C. There was plenty of room in the tar sands.
Inside, Mitch tugged off his heavy, grease-grimed boots, and they left his fingers gummy when he knelt to unknot the laces. About the only thing he wanted was a beer and a nap, but not a dozen steps out of the entryway the kitchen fixture wouldn’t turn on, and it was probably something Andie already told him about, something he should’ve fixed days or weeks ago, so he grabbed a chair and wiggled the curly fluorescent bulb and it flared to bright, and he blinked turquoise spots from his eyes. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and his wife. Overhead, wallpaper banded the ceiling, patterned with chickens and leopards and zebras and giraffes. The guys at the mill would give him hell for that, but it kept Andie happy.
Mitch bent backward at the hip until his spine popped and the tension lessened. It’d been an extra eight hours shoving lumber and he was gamy with the smell of sawdust and that metallic thing tools do to your hands. Everything ached. Invermere’s was about the only mill in all B.C. that hadn’t gone fully auto – valley stubbornness, valley fascination with relics. He shrugged his coat over the back of a kitchen chair. It used to be his dad’s, that coat, and over the years Mitch had sewn its holes and fixed its tears and patched it with reflectors so the late-shifters wouldn’t knock him blindly into a presser. Whenever he caught flak from the young bucks who strutted around invincible, Mitch reminded them of the kid whose legs got crushed so bad that bone fragments ravaged his blood-stream like grains of mortared glass.
He dug his gloves from the coat’s gut pocket and tossed them in the laundry sink. Splinters jutted from the palms, not deep enough to gouge his skin. He’d thank God for that, if it mattered – little in the world disgusted him more than slivers. Once, during a dry summer in his childhood when he romped through the wilderness like a kid ought to, a buddy of his snagged a wood shard in his palm, fat as a pencil, and the hand swelled up like a boxing glove. It had something to do with wood pulp, something to do with allergies, but that ballooning hand stayed radiant in Mitch’s memory.
He collapsed on the couch in his dirty overalls knowing Andie would give him hell, and, as if sensing him through the ether, upstairs a light flicked on. Andie descended, hand trailing on the banister. She wore a forest-green bathrobe that, when pulled closed, would display a logo of a windmill with a great, proud S in its centre. Mitch bought it for her three years ago to celebrate the rebranding of the Calgary Flames into the Saskatchewan Windfarmers – her homeland’s first NHL team since its failed bid for the Saskatoon Blues almost five decades earlier, in the eighties.
Andie’s brown hair hung to her shoulders and Mitch stared at her like always. He’d never known anyone who could be so beautiful first thing in the morning. Her nose bent a little sideways – she broke it, years and years ago, with her own knee – but she had the creamy skin of a movie star. She put her shoulder against the wall. Her bathrobe swayed open but she cinched it shut. The small lines around her eyes and at the corners of her lips made her look older than she was. He probably had something to do with that.
—It’s cold, she said.
Mitch leaned forward on his thighs. —I can turn up the heat, he said.
—You alright?
—Tired.
—Come to bed.
He shrugged as best he could. Her shoulders slumped as she looked at him, dirty, on her couch. Maybe she was thinking of those nights he didn’t come home, if he sat, filthy, on another woman’s furniture. Maybe she remembered the way he smelled afterward, as though some of the mill had rubbed off on those foreign sheets, or those sheets onto him. He could wash and wash but there was always a residue Andie could detect and he’d see it in her eyes.
—I gotta work in a few hours anyway, he said.
—It’s stupid. You working like this.
She picked her way to the kitchen. Her bathrobe caught a kernel of stray cat food and it rolled on the laminate, over and over, ticking like a moth. She brewed coffee – organic, shade-grown, fair-trade roast that cost him three dollars more per pound than it would’ve ten years earlier. You couldn’t even get non-organic coffee anymore, unless you went instant, and Andie refused to drink instant. So Mitch forked out, to keep her happy, even though the guys at the mill gave him hell for it same as they had been for however many years. The world changed, Mitch figured, but people more or less stayed the same.
—There’s oil on the gloves in the sink, he said.
—I’ll wash them.
—You don’t have to.
—I don’t mind, Mitch.
He joined her in the kitchen and she brought him a ceramic coffee cup and the heat stung his fingers as he took it. The mug had a picture of an old friend, Will Crease, being punched in the gut by his dad. Its caption read: You’re not in Mayberry anymore! Mitch had snapped the photo for that mug, at a family dinner after Will’s dad came back from Kosovo. Those were better times, maybe. Andie folded into the chair nearest him and nudged her bathrobe closed around the lapel, but not before Mitch glimpsed skin.
—Luke’s still not here, she said.
And that, his son, was just one more thing.
—When’d he leave?
Andie gave a half-hearted shrug.
—I guess I’ll go look for him.
—It’s almost morning. He’ll be home or at work in a couple hours.
—You’d think he’d have the courtesy to call, Mitch said.
Andie dragged a hair behind her ear and he immediately regretted saying even that. She had her eyes fixed right on him, and after a second she reached across to touch his face – he’d bruised it slightly, caught a chunk of stray pine to his cheekbone. He knew what she must have been thinking: who was he to judge Luke for not coming home at night? Did he ever call? There was something so humiliating about being judged on par with a teenager, let alone your son.
—Want me to make breakfast? she said.
—I’ll grab something from Tim’s on the way.
She spun her mug between thumb and index. Mitch knew a joke about women who did that at a bar, but didn’t mention it. She was never a touchy woman. He ran his finger along a gouge in the table and counted the knots in the grain. —If Luke comes home, he said, but couldn’t bring himself to ask anything of her.
She glided to him and he felt her palm land on the back of his chair. Her nails therrapped the wood. Mitch curled his fingers around the mug and squeezed as hard as he could, until the heat needled his palm. Then Andie dragged her fingernails over his scalp and he closed his eyes and felt something like relaxation, if for just an instant.
—I’ll let you know, she said, and kissed his forehead.
—I need to set things right.
She rubbed his cheek. Her smooth knuckles ground against his stubble and the warmth from that hand spilled into his cheek, the warmth from the mug into his palm.
AN HOUR LATER, Mitch’s watch alarm woke him from a frail sleep. His head was in Andie’s lap, her fingers dragging pleasant lines on his scalp. She told him he didn’t have to go to work, that he had nothing to prove, and he hovered with his chin against his chest and his palms flat on the edge of the couch. He could get a lot done with even one day off work. But Mitch pulled his arms back and wiped a knuckle in his eye and cashed in on some last energy reserve. —That’s not how it is, he told her.
Once beyond town limits he stopped at the Tim Hortons and got them to fill his thermos. The drive to the sawmill took him along a mountain ridge with Invermere and much of the valley beneath him in a well of darkness. The goats were out in force, more than he’d ever seen. They loitered at the roadside or straddled the yellow line, mouths grinding circles, and Mitch wove among them. Years back, in the days when Luke was still breastfeeding and they were so broke they sometimes ate dinner with his mom of necessity, he struck one of those goats with his Ranger. The creature barrel-rolled over his hood and landed on its knees in the box, all anger and not injured. After much baying and coaxing, Mitch phoned in sick because he couldn’t chase the creature from his truck.
The road brought him through a hotel town called Radium, with major construction under way on a strip mall along its main drag. As he drove through, Mitch spotted his brother’s truck, a forty-five-thousand-dollar enviro-friendly bio-dieseled no-footprint half-ton with Cooper Contracting decaled on the side. Nowadays Paul bid whole subdivisions, didn’t work piecemeal jobs in satellite towns where his name wouldn’t carry weight. And he no longer strapped on tools – just marched job sites with suits in tow, marked comments on blueprints, pupils like dollar signs.
Mitch pulled in next to the truck and scanned for Paul and spotted him in the doorway of the reno’d Liquor Depot, propping it open so two goons could haul drywall through. Mitch had a year and a half on Paul but his brother looked a decade younger, had good colour in his short hair. His features didn’t sag and he kept a trimmed goatee that split his jaw in two. From profile, that scruff jutted from his chin like a hangnail. Paul wore the trade-mark coonskin hat tilted over his forehead – a relic from their boyhood years. Their dad donned that thing every time he trekked into the great outdoors, and, wearing it, Paul could have been Larry Cooper incarnate.
Paul saw him as he approached. The drywallers made a final pass and his brother stepped from the doorway.
They hugged like men.
—Been a while, man, Paul said.
—How’s it going anyway.
—Comme ci, comme ça.
—Don’t talk crazy to me, Mitch said, and Paul grinned.
In the background, saws whirred and men barked orders. The air smelled like tools.
—You look like you’re about to die, Paul said.
—Worked a couple double shifts is all. On my way there for a triple.
—Time for a coffee?
Mitch pretended to look at his watch. He was rolling overtime, didn’t need to show up if he wanted a day off, wouldn’t be missed. —Yeah.
They rode Paul’s half-ton a few blocks to a little shop called the Daily Grind, off the main street among a row of old houses with great, sagging power cables. It was run by an old Ukrainian couple with wide smiles who lived above the shop. Mitch ordered a jelly donut and an empty mug and Paul asked for the usual and shoved Mitch out of the way to toss around his money.
They parked themselves in a far corner. The place was shelved full of fresh bread and black-and-white pictures of the old Ukrainian guy in different places around the world. Paul flipped open two different cellphones and shut them both off and rattled them on the table. He had a gigantic foamy coffee with whipped cream the guys at the mill would call a faggaccino.
—Awful job. I don’t know why I took it in the first place, Paul said.
—Money.
—The owner, Norm, leaves a trail of slime when he walks, Mitch. How many hours you putting in, anyway?
—Did eighty-four last week.
—Why?
Mitch bit his donut and looked anywhere but at Paul. In grade school he once won a jelly donut for a math test and all the filling burst onto his shirt on the first bite.
—What else am I gonna do?
—Sleep, maybe.
—Can’t. No, can’t do that.
Paul pushed his fingertips to his temples. —You alright? Paul said, and Mitch felt him searching. —I thought she forgave you. Last time we talked.
—I’ve been thinking about Hunter lately, Mitch said.
—Mitch.
—Hunter was some dog. I remember when Luke was a year old and we went to Mom’s for Christmas. He latched onto Hunter’s coat and Hunter pulled him around the living room.
—How is Luke? Paul said.
—Seventeen. That’s how he is.
Mitch sipped coffee straight from his thermos and Paul stabbed the foam atop his drink with a bamboo stir stick. When they were children, he and Paul swore oaths to each other never to drink coffee, or alcohol, or smoke cigarettes.
Then Mitch’s cellphone rang and Andie’s number came up on the call display. He flashed the screen to his brother and mouthed ball and chain.
—Luke’s here, Andie said.
—How is he?
—The same.
—I’ll come home.
—He won’t stay, Andie said. —Hurry.
Mitch set his phone beside his brother’s two and exhaled a long breath. Maybe he’d get a day off, after all. —I’m so tired nowadays, he said, staring at the table.
—He just needs some time. He’s seventeen.
—I don’t even see how it has anything to do with him.
—Dad hauled you from the cop shop when you were his age, Paul said with a wink. He sipped his fancy coffee and Mitch gulped the tar-like crap from his thermos.
—It’s Andie too, he said. —We’ve talked and moved on but I see it in her eyes.
Paul tapped his temple, shrugged like a man who’d given things up. —Me and Vic. Well.
Mitch scratched his chin and then both he and Paul leaned back in their chairs, hands hooked behind their heads. Identical like brothers. Paul pocketed his two phones, one in each chest pouch like weird, square breasts. There weren’t, Mitch realized, many people left who he could have a conversation with.
MITCH KNEW AS SOON AS he opened the door that Luke was gone. The house smelled like burning and he noticed the screen door open behind Andie, who sat at the kitchen table with her forehead against her wrist. Red, blobbed liquid seeped down the stove and pooled at its base. There was an upturned stainless steel pot on the floor and soup splatters on the cupboards and counters.
—I missed him, Mitch said.
—I spilled soup on the burner, Andie said, and cracked the knuckles in her fist. She stared at the kitchen table. Every sense in Mitch’s body told him he was not welcome in that kitchen. —What took so long? she said.
—It’s a bit of a drive.
—A bit of a drive.
Mitch eased a chair from under the table and its legs scraped the laminate floor. He abandoned that idea, put two hands on the back and stretched, as if aching.
—Andie? he said.
—That takes five minutes.
Dollops of soup had splashed onto the fridge and the microwave and if the situation were any different he’d have chuckled. Andie’s eyes followed him around her kitchen. He snagged the paper towel roll from its holster under the cabinets and wiped the first gobs around the burner.
—Where were you? she said.
He tossed a sloppy wad in the garbage. —At the mill, he said, not understanding why he’d lie.
—Luke said –
—Couldn’t you hear the saws?
—He quit his job.
Mitch shoved the garbage back under the sink and closed the door with his foot. It bounced back open and banged his shin. —Why’d he quit? Mitch said, and hunkered down on all fours to mop up the mess.
—I didn’t ask. He wanted me to.
—Everything I do for him.
—He said he doesn’t forgive you.
Mitch rocked onto his heels. He tossed another heap of soiled towels into the garbage. What the hell was he supposed to do about that? —For what? he said.
Andie had no response and wouldn’t look at him when he tried to catch her eye.
—And why the fuck should that be any of his business?
Still, she would not look at him.
—He should get his own fucking life in line before he starts judging mine.
He heaved the garbage back under the sink and washed his hands.
—Andie, he said, looking out the window, and when she said nothing: —Andrea!
Her chair made a noise on the floor and he turned to find her staring at him. —I guess I’ll go look for him, he managed. She nodded and he watched her, the way she ran her tongue along her teeth, the way she fiddled with her big toe when she was nervous. Of course he didn’t deserve to be forgiven.
MITCH SEARCHED UNTIL he grew tired of the hopelessness. He’d been raised in Invermere and he thought he knew the hangouts: the barely upright fort down Caribou Road where kids got shitfaced; the gelati café off main street that was opened by a guy just out of highschool, who was now the mayor; the bakery, where he himself used to hang, where he once had a reputation as a good man. But Luke had his own haunts or he was hiding, or both. So Mitch went home and spent the remaining hours avoiding his wife and unsure why, until he registered the sound of her feet on the stairs, the tired creak of their boxspring that, at one point or another, she’d probably asked him to replace. Still, he waited on the couch, awake and dressed like a workman, knowing full well that he didn’t have to, that she probably didn’t even want him to.
When at last he joined her, he found Andie cocooned beneath their duvet. Mitch slid in next to her, fully clothed. Her hair spilled around the pillows and from the edge of the bed – where he slept now – he touched strands of it as though remembering. A breeze slipped through the open window and the temperature dropped, prickled his neck and the skin below his jaw. He felt his heat escaping, couldn’t will himself to get up to close the window. Andie stirred, shifted toward him, and he slid his hand beneath her as she moved. She draped a wing of blanket over him. Her body was warm against his knuckles. She smelled like peach and orange, or something else fruity, a shampoo maybe. It smelled good.
The phone woke him. Andie rolled on top of him and blinked and for a moment there was space between those two rings, her palm flattened on his chest, him inhaling her breath, the way she prodded his feet with her toes. They were as close as they used to be, bodies curved, bodies enmeshed. Then a second ring shook through him and he fumbled over the night table. A pair of reading glasses hit the floor, some loose change rattled under his searching hand. His fingers found the receiver.
—Hello, he said.
—Mr. Cooper? a man said from the other end. The call display read BLOCKED ID.
—Yeah. Who’s this?
—Constable Crease, Invermere RCMP. We’ve got your son in the drunk tank sobering up. He says you’ll come get him.
The voice paused. Mitch listened to the silence. It’d been a long time since he talked to one of the Creases. Will, John, Ash – where did they even live? He’d gotten it backward, completely backward: the world didn’t change, at least not much, at least not over one lifetime. But people? Christ, all he had to do was look at himself, there in the dark – both unforgiven and unwilling to be forgiven. Maybe some mistakes could never be set right.
—If not, the officer continued, —he can stay with us and you can get him in the morning.
Mitch glanced at the clock: two fifty-three a.m. —Hold on, he said.
He told Andie in four words that the cops had Luke. She leaned her head against the drywall. In the glow of the alarm clock, her hair draped around her shoulders.
—Leave him in the tank, she said.
Mitch watched her. His wife. —I’ll come get him, he said into the phone.
Andie put her head back on the pillow and Mitch rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm.
—It’s cold, Andie said from the bed.
—I won’t be long.
She poked her nose from beneath the covers. The skin on her arms glowed. There was nobody in the world more beautiful and he hated himself on such a fundamental level.
Mitch descended the stairs and threw on his jacket and his heavy boots and grabbed the remains of a six-pack from his fridge. Then he went out the door and climbed into his Ranger with its rusted door and missing tailpipe and tore a beer from its yoke. There were two ways to get to the detachment and he chose the longer one, past the school where a group of kids stood in a tight circle, a periodic flame bobbing between them. He finished his beer and tossed the empty out the window. He hit two of the two red lights in town and told God to fuck right off.
The detachment was a solid red brick building. His son and Constable Crease waited inside under a wall-mounted buffalo head. The officer had dark glasses, was shorter than him, seemed to tighten his jaw in that way a man does to shrug off bitter memories; they used to be best friends. Luke slouched in a chair.
—Hey Will, he said to the officer.
—Hey, Mitch, the officer said.
Luke didn’t look half bad: red around the eyes, a little dirty. What Mitch expected from a kid out partying. —May as well get out of here, he said, and led the way to the truck, where he cranked the heat because it seemed so unnaturally cold for August. Luke hucked his pack in the box and hopped in the passenger side and stared out the window at nothing. After a bunch of random tuning Mitch got the classic rock station to play without static. They drove.
—You don’t need to be embarrassed, Mitch said.
Luke shrugged.
—I don’t care that you’re a little drunk or stoned or whatever.
Luke placed his forehead on the window. His breath clouded the glass and he drew on the fog with his finger. —This isn’t the way home, he said.
—That okay?
—You know you can always call me. If you need a ride. Anytime. I don’t mind.
—Okay.
They drove. Mitch fumbled with the radio when it went to shit and static blasted out the speakers. Luke didn’t react to his fumbling or his discomfort and only shifted when a pothole bounced his head against the window. Mitch had to give up on the radio; he had to watch the road. Could nothing go right?
—I wish you’d have stuck around earlier. I just wanted to talk.
Luke half shook his head. —You’re talking now.
—I guess I am.
They passed the school. The kids were gone. His beer can lolled in the wind at the edge of the road, near the ditch. He had two left. He could offer one to Luke.
—I don’t know why you’re mad at me.
—Yes you do.
—I just wish you didn’t hate me.
—You don’t get it, Luke said, his voice heavy with the drawl of marijuana. —I don’t hate you. I’m disappointed in you.
His house appeared in the edges of his headlights. He’d built it himself, how many years ago, concrete through to shingles, and now it needed repair. Same as his family, maybe – something else he’d built that needed repair. Except Mitch knew he could fix the house, he loved fixing things, was good at fixing things, and he knew he could never cause enough damage to bring it all down atop him. —I’m disappointed in me too, he wanted to say.
The engine idled in the driveway and the headlights illuminated the flaking paint on the garage door. He needed to paint that, vaguely recalled Andie asking him to do it. Luke stepped out, swung his pack on his shoulder, and disappeared inside. Mitch killed the ignition and the headlights and pulled the e-brake, and then shifted the truck to first gear because the e-brake felt too loose to hold. He rested his hands on the steering wheel and stretched his fingers. The light in Luke’s room flickered on and his son’s head bobbed inside the window. One window over was the master bedroom, where Andie slept. In a few hours it’d be morning and Mitch would haul himself from bed, shove lumber until his muscles trembled and all that kept him from shutdown was some primal drive to work his way to redemption.
The Ranger’s engine hissed in the August night. Mitch tweaked the key so the radio revived and he caught the tail of a nineties rock ballad. Luke’s light went out and Mitch felt the evening air sweep through the rickety old truck, that relic of a truck. You go on and you go on – that’s what Mitch knew. You go on and things work out or they don’t but you keep trying, you keep on trying, because you have no other choice. He didn’t leave the truck right away, just stayed in his seat and listened to rock songs from his youth and stared at those two dark windows.