1.

The Miata was pieced back together. I did what my body allowed, but mostly watched Jack work. He took few swipes at me. I guessed all he wanted or needed to hear me say was that I needed help.

Struggling into the driver’s seat, I turned the key and the engine fired up first time – its pitch different and revs smoother. Still unable to compress the clutch myself, I switched spots with Jack and watched him take it through the gears. A sense of pride I hadn’t expected washed over me as the rear wheels span in the air.

I made it downstairs on a Saturday morning later that week without the aid of the handrail for the first time since the canyon. It was an accomplishment of sorts, but left a sudden and sharp sadness in me. Jack and Diane seemed to feel it too as I moved into the kitchen with newfound pace. There was an unspoken acknowledgement that I’d stay only until healed enough to go. I didn’t ask Jack how much, if any, of my story Diane had been told. We sat on the porch as steam was raised and robbed in the slow breeze.

Diane asked if I was excited to see California and what I had planned. Maybe he hadn’t passed anything onto her after all. I said I would play it by ear. Jack furled a sad kind of smile, then sunk it behind his mug.

I unhitched the gate and stepped through. The dog rushed ahead on the path we’d walked many times before, circling back and ushering me to pick up the pace, becoming frustrated when I couldn’t. I moved as fast as I could across the hills, using one of the hiking poles as a cane, but it was still a crawl. Soon he accepted the futility of his efforts and strode beside me in silence. We made it about two hundred yards before my knee began pinching and I had to stop. ‘Sorry, buddy, this is about all I’ve got,’ I said, our disappointment manifest in an un-wagging tail.

I looked around. Everything seemed so hard and brutal, and me so soft and weak among it. But then, on top of that second hill, where the land could be seen for miles in all directions, came a realisation.

During one of these days in Arizona, I had become older than my father was when he wrote from Holbrook. The man I’d grown up envisioning as perpetually older, wiser and more weathered than I had suddenly become my junior. If there was some secret to living in this world, I’d now had more time to figure it out than he did. For the first time in my life, I saw my father as a boy, in all the same ways I still felt myself to be. I was alone on the other side of the world chasing some invisible monster in my mind, while he was here running from the one in his.

The resentment that shaped my image of him, and the world I blamed him for, began to fall away like dead leaves. Soon, only undecorated branches remained, unsure of which way to grow. How much time I’d lost; all the days wasted on sadness, only to stubbornly affirm the others that had come before and been wasted the same way. I began moving towards the house. My horizon shifted with each hobbling step, and I realised my father’s had done the same for him.

Jack carried my bags down the front steps as Diane and I followed. He’d moved the Miata to the gravel clearing outside the garage, its top down to make my entry easier. I pressed on the trunk, threw my backpack onto the passenger seat and worked arms through my leather jacket. ‘Oh, just a second,’ Jack said, hurrying back into the house. After a moment, he returned with my bottle of bourbon and handed it over like a dog that’d retrieved a ball. Diane curled a brow. I studied the corked neck and chewed-up label.

‘You keep it,’ I said, handing it back. ‘Put it on your shelf or something. That way it’ll be like I’m still here.’

‘This could never replace you; it couldn’t possibly be as annoying.’

‘Yeah, but it’ll be just about as much use to you.’

He took it from me with stormy eyes. I lowered myself into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. Bringing the clutch up, my knee shuddered in pain and the rear wheels spewed gravel. The engine stalled. I turned the key and tried again. More spat gravel, then silence.

‘Oh, Mark, dear, that knee is too weak. You’re not ready,’ Diane said.

I looked down at the steering wheel and wondered if she was right.

‘No,’ Jack interjected. ‘He’ll be fine.’

‘Jesus, Jack, he can’t even get out of the driveway. How’s he going to make it to California?’

‘He can, he just hasn’t yet. Maybe he’s a little tougher than you give him credit for.’

I turned the key again, flexed the muscles in my leg to support the knee and brought the clutch up. The Miata coughed gravel, bucking forward without stalling, and coasted down the driveway. Jack, Diane and the dog followed on foot. I pulled the shifter back to neutral and waited at the gate. Diane hugged me as I climbed from the car, saying I was welcome anytime; Jack shook my hand, agreeing in as few words as possible. I held the dog’s head in my hands, bringing our foreheads together for a moment, then sat back into the Miata and pushed the shifter into first. There was a hand on my shoulder.

‘Go on. It isn’t far now,’ Jack said, leaning in, and not speaking loud enough for Diane to hear. He stepped back and I waved. It was hard to see the world as a bad place with such goodness waving back. I moved away from the property, turning onto asphalt curving around a hill. The Miata went into third gear with a jolt as I jerked the clutch up. The hill came between me and their waving arms as I watched yet another direction I could’ve taken shrink to nothing in the outline of a rear-vision mirror. What a petty and magnificent thing this life is.

I swerved into a gas station, filled up and bought a fresh packet of cigarettes. Humming along the section of Route 66 running through Holbrook, I slid my sunglasses on, yanked the wheel and floored it. The Miata surged up the on-ramp, its revs climbing with glee as it sang proudly into the desert. Orbison was on the radio. I moved the shifter and flew onto Interstate 40 towards the final letter.