Marydale woke in the cab of her truck where she had parked at the Firesteed Summit. It took her a moment to realize her phone was ringing, wedged somewhere beneath her hip. She startled more fully awake. It was Kristen. It had to be. She fumbled for the phone and answered it a second before she registered the name on the screen: Aldean.
“Hey, princess,” he said.
She rubbed her eyes. The gorge wasn’t beautiful without Kristen. The wildfire smoke had washed the color out of the already muted landscape. The squares of brown farmland looked like failure. There was no water. No one won.
“I need you to come over to the Pull-n-Pay,” Aldean said.
She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to talk about the still. She didn’t want to sit around drinking warm Coke and whiskey while Aldean smoked and welded, oblivious to the fact that he was one bad valve away from blowing up the place. She didn’t want to report to Cody or go to work or listen to Mr. Fisher complain that the meat loaf tasted meatier in 1960. Weariness settled in the very viscera of her body.
“Can I come tomorrow?” she asked.
“Pops is dead,” Aldean said.
Marydale arrived at the Pull-n-Pay an hour later. The sun was up, streaming over the junkyard. Aldean was waiting for her at the gate. He took her hand, which he hadn’t done since they were ten. Together they walked through the piles of scrap metal and gutted cars.
Inside, the mobile home smelled of cigarettes and motor oil. Across the small, cluttered living room, Pops lay in his recliner, his mouth partially open, his eyes closed, an ancient man in a flat-brimmed John Deere cap. He didn’t really look much deader than usual. Nonetheless, Marydale didn’t need to look for the rise of breath to know that he was gone. The stillness in the room was absolute. She and Aldean stood in the doorway for a long time.
Finally Aldean said, “Let’s have a toast.”
Marydale didn’t mention that it was eight in the morning. It wasn’t eight in the morning for Pops.
Aldean retrieved a half-empty bottle of Poisonwood and two glasses from the kitchen cupboard, and they went outside.
“Aren’t you going to give him some of your good stuff?” Marydale asked.
“Pops always loved Poisonwood.”
He poured two small glasses. They stood together, the rising sun making giants of their shadows.
“To Pops,” Marydale said.
“To Pops.” Aldean uncorked the bottle again and poured a thin, slow stream of whiskey on the ground.
When it was gone, Marydale asked, “Did you just find him?”
“I think I knew last night, but I didn’t want them to come take him away in the middle of the night. It just seemed right that he wake up at home.” His voice broke. “Or wherever he is now.”
Marydale took his hand again, feeling the calluses and smelling the cigarette smoke on his clothes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“He was a good man. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t taken me in,” Aldean said. “My fucking tweaker dad and tweaker mom…If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know. Sometimes I thought he was just staying alive until I was old enough to take care of myself. You know? Like he was hanging on for me. And sometimes I wanted to say, ‘You can go now.’” Aldean was crying. “He used to make me beans for breakfast. He’d just open the can and put it right on the stove, and he was there every morning.”
He squeezed Marydale’s hand. “Marydale, I can go now. I can leave. I can sell the Pull-n-Pay and go to Portland.” He looked at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll get everything ready. I’ll start the distillery, and when your PO agrees to a transfer, you can come live with me, and we’ll run it together.”
The sun stung Marydale’s eyes. The Poisonwood burned her stomach. She saw Kristen’s stricken face. She imagined Aldean’s old Dodge pulling out of the Pull-n-Pay for the last time. And she wished that her tears were for Pops, who deserved them, but she couldn’t even remember his real name—Floyd or Myron—and she clung to Aldean and cried for herself.