FUCK, IT WAS COLD FOR OCTOBER. TWENTY DEGREES COLDER than usual, all month, the coldest fall he’d ever known here. Leaves already weeks gone, and frost on the windshield this morning. Ryan turned down the dirt driveway—the cold made for a harder, tighter crunch beneath the tires—and pulled over to the turnout. Kelly’s pickup rolled in after him and pulled into the garage. He always let her have the garage, a gesture she pretended to refuse only the first time.
The day had been a good one. Even with a cancellation at the barbershop, three walk-ins had shown up and his chair stayed full: Bemidji State students back from fall break; his favorite old guy, Stan the ex-logger; and just before closing, Everett, one of his first friends in Bemidji. You never knew who would stick—people Ryan had once thought he’d know forever were long gone, and the scrappy teens from the carnival concession stand who’d offered Edith Head a hot dog were now friends he’d known for a quarter of his life. Since they’d met, Everett had grown from a bashful boy who requested spikes and streaks to a drily funny, heavyset twenty-six-year-old who kept his thick black hair tidy and lived his punk aspirations through his work. He’d found his purpose working at the juvenile residential treatment center, trying to be a role model for fellow Native kids and a gentle man to all the youth, who mostly knew masculinity as a brittle and brutal condition. And he was formidable at air hockey. Ryan had trimmed him up clean, swept the shop, and then he and Everett walked to Brigid’s Pub for burgers and a game of air hockey before Everett headed to his evening shift. Donita was bartending and gave them a cup of quarters from the till to load up the jukebox with something decent: “Gonna die if I hear Nickelback one more time.” Then Kelly had shown up, and they had a couple of drinks, and she was the one who suggested coming to his place. “Don’t you teach a nine o’clock on Thursdays?” he’d asked, and she’d said she was giving a test tomorrow: “No prep! I can just roll in there and administer.”
Now inside the door, they shared a tipsy kiss—she always kissed better when she’d had a drink, more relaxed and insistent at the same time—and then she set about getting the planned bourbon and ice cream.
Edith Head wound around Ryan’s legs, croaking, while he scooped a pungent lump of wet food into her dish. She couldn’t swing kibble anymore. Kelly found the bourbon in its cabinet over the sink. “Your time machine is blinking,” she said.
“Ha ha,” he said. The telephone base was flashing 1, 1, 1. Kelly had almost given up on persuading him to get a cell phone. (“I don’t want to be found all the time,” he said. “What if I want to find you?” she asked. “You will,” he said. “I always come home eventually.”)
Ryan cradled the phone to his ear and clicked the voice mail button as he opened the freezer. The light had been out for weeks, he made a mental note to fix it—
The voice was a child’s. A young girl’s. Polite. Formal. A faint tremor in it.
The cold air of the freezer ran up his arm and into his chest.
Lucia. That was the name Andrea liked.
Kelly grabbed his shoulder. “Dude. Are you having a seizure or something?”
The voice mail ended and he stood in front of the open freezer, staring into the dim foodscape.
“No, sorry.” He shut the door and turned to her. He clicked off the phone.
“The ice cream?”
“Oh yeah.” He opened it again and took out the pint.
Kelly gave him that look—Sociology Eyes, he called it, when she peered at him as if he were one of her study subjects. “What’s up?”
Ryan tried to push the voice mail into a mental drawer, shut it and go on with this night. But it wouldn’t leave. That small clear voice. I think you might be my—never mind. “Just a kind of odd message.”
“Odd how?”
“I couldn’t quite understand it.”
Kelly offered to listen and reached for the phone, but Ryan demurred, said he’d listen again later. He dropped the phone on the counter and swept an arm around her waist. “You’re all I want to listen to right now, Professor. Where’s that bourbon?”
This is Lucia.
That night Ryan lay awake while Kelly slept soundly beside him, nude except for her wool socks. Edith snored in her bed on top of the dresser.
He had a life now—a life in which Lucia did not exist. His mother didn’t even know about her. No one knew about her.
In the first year or two he’d written her several letters he’d never sent. What would be the point? To mythologize himself? Set up some kind of unfulfillable longing? Creep out Andrea? The last thing the kid needed was to think she had a father out there somewhere who’d ditched her. Whatever story Andrea had told her would be one she could live with. For once he’d done the thing that would be better for someone else, or so he’d told himself at the time. He’d let it go.
The way he had trained himself to think about the kid was as if he had given it up for adoption, to Andrea. Women weren’t expected to talk about the pregnancies they’d terminated or babies they’d given up, so why should he? From the stories Everett told from the juvenile center, well, it was clear that no dad at all was better than a bad one.
Would he have been a bad one? He’d have cheated on Andrea, most likely. He usually did cheat on women back then. And he’d never had much interest in preverbal humans. Though he did like how psychedelic and freaky they were in that little-kid stage, he wanted nothing to do with meltdowns and high volumes and excretory fixations and mollifying snacks. Teenagers were all right. If anything interesting in them survived the sausage factory of public schooling and consumer culture, that’s when it revealed itself. For some reason he had pictured the kid finding him at eighteen. A near-grown girl. He pictured her with black hair pulled back messily, or maybe cut short and bold. Inexplicably, his imagination sometimes put fingerless gloves on her.
This version of her was tough and cool. Impervious to doubt and hurt. Didn’t need or miss or want something as conventional as a heterosexual white biological father. She would just be . . . curious. She’d pull out a cigarette and offer him one. He’d say no thanks, and then remember to scold her. Except at eighteen, it would be her right to smoke, and not his to parent her; she’d be her own adult person then. They could see eye to eye.
But ten years old? Too soon for him. He needed at least eight more years to be ready for this.
He padded out to the cold kitchen and listened again to the message.
I’m looking for Ryan Coates.
Fuck.