It was late spring but there was a smell of ashes and a clap of bitterness to the air. Greg had opened his window to feel the sun on his face but ended up closing it quickly. Not that he didn’t welcome the brace; it was interesting, nice even, to expect warmth but be greeted with ice. He welcomed the gentle disorientation; he welcomed the cold, so opposite of the close heat of Florida. It reminded him that time would continue plodding along, day to day, season to season. Soon it would be summer, then autumn, then winter … time would pass. It was a certainty, a comfort.

Deb was still in the house. He could hear the groaning floorboards downstairs as she walked from the kitchen to the porch, probably filling her bird feeders, as she did every Wednesday. She was afraid to leave him alone for too long, he knew. She’d flown down to collect him—her word, collect, as if he were a tax. She’d used their miles, miles they’d talked about using to visit wine country or Hawaii someday. Instead she’d had to gouge them to fly down and be met at the airport by Marie, and then be driven to the hospital by Marie, and then hear from the doctor that he’d attacked someone in a bar and then had a panic attack. She’d had to take a taxi to the tow lot where the RV was, had to pay for it to be professionally cleaned of the rotting food and moldy cups and puddles of blood and the sewage that had burbled up through the shower drain and dried. She described all of this to him later, when they’d been home a few days, speaking gently to him, every sentence with a tentative question mark at the end of it. And there was food, so much food? And there were empty bottles? As if she was asking him to remember, begging him to confirm it all for her. He had just showered; his hair was too long and was wetting his shirt collar. His feet were bare. The couch had given in underneath him as it always had. Deb had made them mugs of tea. The trees outside hushed each other. This was home; Deb was home. Still, he couldn’t hold back the urge to want to shout, to yell, So? To ask her why she believed everything had to make sense. Instead he sat silently, nodding, his hands upturned in his lap. They hadn’t worked well since Florida. He could no longer make a satisfying fist. He still didn’t know where GJ was and he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was Deb’s fault. She’d put a stop to it all, brought him home. Exactly where he didn’t want to be, it turned out.

He opened the window again. Where did he want to be? His face began to sting from the cold. Nowhere.

He and Deb had driven the RV back over the course of two days, spending the night in a Sherwood Inn that smelled like a hot Band-Aid. Mostly he’d slept, or pretended to sleep. He saw a sign for a place called Eat ’n’ See and couldn’t recall if that was the same place he’d stopped his first night on the road, a hundred lifetimes ago. Deb was good at letting him be, at not asking questions, or maybe he was giving her too much credit. Maybe she just didn’t want to know.

“Well, this will all make sense with time,” Deb had said that day on the couch. “There’s a purpose for everything.” And over the coming days, she’d hung a leather strap laden with bells on the door to the pantry and trashed all the alcohol in the house, even the gooed-up bottle of NyQuil that had been in the downstairs bathroom for years. The pastor at her church even came to dinner one Friday night, glopped Deb’s taco casserole onto his plate while telling Greg about the men’s group and the AA meetings the church offered. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” the pastor said. There was a bean stuck midway up the man’s fork, and Greg waited for the man to catch it with each bite, but there it remained. Greg laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Deb stood to offer the store-bought flan but the pastor said he didn’t have a sweet tooth. Deb walked him out and Greg watched as they hugged for just a smidge too long, the pastor’s hand at the back of Deb’s head, their bodies touching from shoulders to knees. He surprised himself by feeling flooded with relief, for her and for himself.

He went downstairs. Deb was still on the porch, hanging her feeders. He opened the pantry, holding the leather strap in his hand to dull the chimes. Multigrain crackers, a jar of purple olives, a box of Grape-Nuts. He took a handful of the crackers; a difficult seed immediately got caught in his molar. It should have been the end, is what it came down to. In his heart, he was sorry he hadn’t died on the floor of that bar. He’d thought he was dying and he had not, and it was not a polite kind of disorientation. It was not making sense with time.

He dialed GJ’s number and got a recording explaining that the number was no longer in service. He had not heard from Marie and had not tried to call.

Deb came in from the porch, bringing a sail of icy wind with her. “Aren’t those interesting?” she asked, looking at the crackers. “I found them in the healthy aisle.”

“They’re great,” he said. The seed felt like a rock he’d never loosen. This was the kind of conversation they had now, Deb afraid to say anything real and Greg playing the part of a doddering, harmless old man.

“What would you like for dinner?” Deb asked. “Soup and sandwiches? Some kind of noodles? We could have eggs and potatoes…”

“Why don’t we go out?” It was his way of challenging her. Going out meant the proximity of junk food. The possibility of booze.

“Oh,” she said, drifting off.

“Soup sounds good,” he said. She smiled, relieved. “Can I ask you,” he went on, “about Pastor Lawrence?” His heart began to thunder; he hadn’t planned on saying that.

“About the meetings?” Deb asked.

“No…” He stopped himself. Beyond the windows, the trees were tossing about, the green leaves so new, so bright that they hurt his eyes. He would never tell Deb about that night with Marie. “Yes, about the meetings.”

She went over to a drawer and pulled out a yellow pad of paper. “I wrote down the times. There is one tonight at five-thirty—that’s the AA one—and a men’s group meeting in the morning on Saturday.”

He had received a letter about three days after returning home. A letter, of all things. Where had GJ gotten a stamp? Where had he gotten an envelope? The postmark was smudged; it was difficult to tell what the zip code was. Greg had read it standing over the sink in his kitchen, listening to the uneven drip dripdrip drip that had lately begun to infuriate him. The letter was typed. Where had GJ gotten access to a computer? A printer?

Dad, I reject your narrative.

The gist of the letter was forgiveness. GJ forgave him; GJ rejected Greg’s version of the story. What story?

We’re both addicts.

Greg had held the letter under the dripping faucet, watching it grow soggy, willing the words to fade. When it finally fell away from his hand and landed in the sink, he turned the water on, and then he pushed the letter down the garbage disposal with the handle of a wooden spoon. He did not mention the letter to Deb, or Marie, and after a few days he’d decided it had never happened, was just a fantasy he had manufactured in his desperate urge to connect with his son.

“Maybe I’ll go tonight,” he said. “Live a little.”

“I love it,” Deb said. It was clear it’d shaken her, his bringing up Pastor Lawrence. She smiled too big, pushed her voice too hard. One of the dining chairs was askew; had she and the pastor done it under the table?

In the car on the way down the mountain, the afternoon light felt sharp, too bright, every leaf and pebble forcing itself into Greg’s view. He took the curves slowly, squinting, every now and again waving his hand in front of his face as if he could shoo away the brightness. Would he really go to the meeting? No, probably not. “Maybe we can have barbecue tonight,” Deb had said. “You could stop at Piggy’s on the way back.” He probably wouldn’t do that, either. Where was he going? Nowhere. When he was a boy, his dog had disappeared one day and never come back. He went off to find a place to die, his father had told him, as if it was something Greg should have known. That’s what old dogs do. It had hurt him back then, imagining the dog dying alone. Now that kind of solitude felt like just the thing. Two more turns and he’d reach the bottom of the mountain, could drive faster, escape the light whipping into his eyes around every turn.

If he was honest with himself, there was a part of him that felt proud of GJ for the letter. Glad. Like he’d been a glue trap holding GJ in place, as his son, as a problem, as something predefined and predictable and forever doomed. GJ had freed himself. Greg had driven off and boomeranged right back to where he started. GJ was the unknown now, Greg the known. But really, weren’t they all? Marie, Deb, GJ. Impossible to know them with any finality. Impossible to hold them. He felt a sharpness in his eye—the salt of a tear? Or maybe it was just that it hurt to look now. It hurt to see. Good for him, he was thinking. Good for him.