18

DANIEL WAKES behind the wheel of his Tacoma. He’d reclined his seat back and from here there is only the sky through the windshield, a strip of cloud like a torn sheet. He thinks of that con in the Sixes who hanged himself from his sink. This rich prick who’d beaten his wife and kids for years then went down for embezzlement.

Daniel is hot and sweating. His windows are cracked, and he can hear the whoosh of air brakes, the rattle of a tractor trailer chassis as it rumbles by. He’s thirsty and needs to piss, and he should try to eat something, too. Taped to his dash is the picture of Susan. He stares at it. She seems to be looking right at him, and she’s far more beautiful than her mother ever got to be. He sits up. There across the New Jersey Turnpike and the wide Hudson River are the sun-baked high-rises of New York City, a place he’s never been. From here, in the parking lot of the biggest rest stop he’s ever seen, the lower tip of Manhattan looks like a glass-and-concrete cluster fuck of commerce, the highest building rising out of where the two fallen towers had been. Daniel had seen a photo of it in the paper, and this close it looks like long wide panes of glass fitted together, the top a spire at least another thousand feet on top of that, maybe more.

There were those months right after when American flags were everywhere—hanging from new poles mounted on people’s porches, or as decals on their car bumpers, or bungeed to pickup truck racks and flapping in the wind. And it was good to be united in hatred for a while. It was good to walk into a store or the library weeks later and have people glance over at him and know right away that he was not one of the bad men. Not him.

Yesterday, Daniel sat at the library keyboard and typed in: how to write your own will. On the desk to his right was his letter to Susan. He’d folded it twice so it would be narrow enough to fit into an envelope, but it was a few pages long and thicker than he’d thought. He could feel the sweat drying under his shirt from the walk from the garage. He usually used the one down in Port City so he could wander downtown for coffee while his truck was getting tuned up, but Angie’s Repairs was close to the library and post office, and now the screen lit up with a page giving him eight steps to complete. He moved the clicker to the print button and tapped it hard.

After the bank, when Daniel had asked that man in front of the Starbucks if he was a lawyer and did he know anything about writing a will, the man laughed and said he’d never be a lawyer, but he was also stand-up and he’d looked at Daniel with the respect good citizens give the old and the dying.

“It’s cheaper to do it yourself. Just go online.”

“God,” the pretty woman had said. “I wish my husband had known that.” She laughed and touched the man’s shoulder and smiled at him and Daniel before she disappeared around the corner and was gone.

At his keyboard Daniel typed in Eckerd College, and before he could even type in where it was, it showed up and he tapped it open and there was a color photograph of the entire campus taken from a helicopter or airplane. There were buildings and a long athletic field and a white sand beach on blue water. There were the green dots of palm trees and glass and chrome flecks of cars, and there was the feeling that he was looking at something far more profound than he was—like a picture of a place where people were happy long before you were born.

Then pictures of students popped up. Boys and girls. They were tanned and wearing white T-shirts, and they looked so damn young and healthy that to know his own Susan was among them, well, it made him feel low and dirty and deeply wrong and he almost stopped everything—the letter, the trip, all of it. But there, at the bottom left corner of the screen, in big black letters on white, were the words: CONTACT US. The center of his bones may as well have been a magnet, those words metal, and he could only take this as a sign. He pulled a pencil from the cup on the windowsill and wrote the address. It occurred to him he had no map, but there was that time he had to drive Rudy Schwartz down to West Roxbury for Thanksgiving, and the lady at the Council on Aging had shown him Google Maps on her computer. Daniel went to that. He did not know where his daughter lived, but he knew where she worked, and he typed that address in as his destination. Then he typed in his own: 26 Butler Place, Salisbury, Massachusetts. He tapped the back of the mouse and there, in less than a full second, was his highlighted route out of Massachusetts, down through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, the route cutting west and south through Maryland and Virginia into the Carolinas then Georgia to Jacksonville and a straight shot down the west coast of Florida. At the top of the page was: 1,402 miles. He could do it in two long days, seven hundred miles each, twelve or so hours of driving each day. But with his condition he’d have to stop more often than he would like. Maybe he’d do it in three, give her more time to get his letter and know he was coming. In fact, he should pay extra and send it overnight. And he should do that before the post office across the street closed, which was soon.

He pressed print then read more about writing your own will. It said that if he didn’t have one then all he owned would go to his next of kin anyway, but it would also go to probate and his “beneficiary” would have a “waiting period,” and he did not want Susan thinking that he had not thought this through for her. He glanced down at the list of things he had to do for his will. It looked long and like a lot of trouble, but so be it. Step number five said you cannot handwrite your will. Step number seven said he had to sign it in front of two witnesses. Who would that be? The final step, number eight, said he had to give the original to “a person who will execute the will on your behalf.” What, Rudy Schwartz? Elaine Muir? They’d probably be gone before he was. He’d have to think about this, and he’d have fourteen hundred miles to do it in, too, because he was not going to slow down now.

Daniel opens his truck door and presses two fingers to the wad of cash in his front pants pocket. For eighteen dollars and change, the postman said Daniel’s letter would be in St. Petersburg by three p.m. today, a Wednesday. When Daniel paid him, he’d pulled out what he’d withdrawn from the bank, four thousand in C-notes. He peeled one off and handed it to him, a short guy with thick glasses and fat cheeks he hadn’t shaved all the way up.

“What’d you, win the lottery?”

Daniel had never been any good at that kind of talk. He wanted to say it was none of his business, but it felt good to be finally sending that letter and the man was being friendly, so he made himself smile and said nothing and waited for his change.

He rises out of the Tacoma and locks the door. His hips and back burn, and there’s a queasiness deep in his gut he needs to feed to get rid of. When he’d backed out of his fenced-in yard at dawn, the siding of his shed looked the color of peaches and he’d like one now. A cool ripe peach. Maybe a cold Coke and some crackers.

The sun is still not directly overhead, and he glances at his watch. He’s been on the road just over five hours, his nap in this parking lot twenty minutes, and he’s still an hour from noon.