It’s six fifteen when he asks David John if they can talk outside. Jewel is in her room reading or playing on her school-issued laptop, and his mom is at the stove, making pasta with red sauce, trying to use up the vegetables in the fridge.
Jessup shrugs the borrowed jacket on again—he’ll need a new one for Idaho, boots too, the winters there making Cortaca look tropical, according to David John—and walks a bit up the driveway. After a minute, David John comes out.
The snow is still holding off, but the air reeks of it, and Jessup wonders when it will start coming down hard. He wonders, too, if he’ll have a feel for the weather in Boise. He’s never lived anywhere else. Never been farther from Cortaca than the northern edge of the Adirondacks, a five-hour drive.
David John is wearing his heavy work jacket, a pair of boots. He doesn’t seem bothered by the cold. He’s lived in the Cortaca area his whole life, too, except for those four years in prison, and even that was upstate New York.
“Sorry,” Jessup says. “You know how it is in there. Hard to talk without Mom . . .”
“You want to go down to the pedestrian mall,” David John says.
Jessup stares at him. Nods. “How’d you know?”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“I know. I just . . . I don’t know.” Jessup rocks back on his heels. He shrugs. “I want to see. I need to see, I guess.”
“Why? You ain’t going to march with Brandon Rogers and his kind. I know that. I’ve been paying attention. That’s not you. Never has been, has it? And that’s why we’re moving. I’m trying to get you away from that.”
“I’ll be careful,” Jessup says. “I don’t know why, but I know I’ve got to, okay? I know I can’t go to Idaho if I don’t. I need to see it through. I can’t just walk away.”
David John studies him. “Yes, Jessup, you can. We are. If I can walk away from this, you can walk away from this. Don’t you understand? We can give up anything if it means saving everything. You going down there? What do you want to see through? What do you think you’re going to get by going down there?”
“For the life of me,” Jessup says, “I can’t tell you what I expect to get out of going.” And then he starts to laugh, and after a pause David John laughs with him.
They stop laughing and Jessup waits. It takes a few seconds, but David John nods. “I don’t like it, but if you really think it’s important, I respect that.”
“Thank you.”
David John pulls the keys to his van out of his jacket pocket, holds them out. But when Jessup goes to take them, David John clasps his hands around Jessup’s hand. “Can we pray first,” he says, “please?”
They bow their heads, foreheads touching.
“Dear Jesus,” David John says, “please guide Jessup. Please find him to safety. Please light the way to peace. Please allow him to forgive himself for his transgressions. Please allow him to ask for forgiveness.”
He doesn’t say Corson’s name, but Jessup feels it within him. Knows that he’ll be asking forgiveness the rest of his life, an angry kid with too much to drink and Jessup hitting the gas just a little too hard, something he should have owned up to but knows in his bones he never will, and now there’s a ghost that will haunt him, will taunt him, and that sound, the truck hitting Corson’s body, will be with him until the end of time, forever and ever, amen.
“Please, dear Jesus,” David John says, “protect my son tonight, allow him to make good decisions, hold him in your love. Hold me, my wife, my daughter, my son.” He pauses and looks at Jessup. “Because you are my son, no matter what you say, Jessup, you are always my son and always have been. Dear Jesus, hold him in your love. Amen.”
And then David John steps forward and wraps his arms around Jessup, holding him, and all Jessup can think of is that day on the football field when he broke his arm, David John cradling him, carrying him, the knowledge that this man would give anything to keep him safe.
Jessup means it when he says it, “Amen.”