The Drive Home
We did not talk much on the county road. Eli was in the back with his forehead on the window, watching the dark fields go by, and every mile or so he would ask a small question that was really the same question.
“Did I ruin it?”
“You did not ruin anything,” I said. “A glass of water is not ruining.”
“Grandpa was mad.”
“Grandpa was wrong,” Dana said from the passenger seat, and she did not soften it, which was not like her.
She was Royce’s daughter. She had spent her whole life managing the space between her father and the people he ran over. When we got married she told me the one rule in her family was that you did not cross her dad in public, because he would make you pay for it in a hundred small ways for a year. I had kept that rule for nine years. I had swallowed a lot to keep it.
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That night, in the dark, with my boy’s forehead on the glass behind me, I was done swallowing.
I did not want to fight Royce. That was the thing. I did not want to call him up and have it out, because there is no winning a fight like that. You cannot make a man see a child he has decided not to see. And it was not the kind of thing you could take to anybody. There was no rule he had broken, no number you could call. He had not done anything but be cruel in a room he owned, and cruelty in your own hall is not against any law I know of.
So I was not going to fight him for a seat at his table.
I was going to set my own.
The idea came to me somewhere around the Blackduck turnoff, and it was so simple it made me laugh out loud, which made Eli look up.
“Hey, bud,” I said, watching him in the mirror. “You want to help me cook this weekend? Big job. The biggest.”
His whole face changed. “What are we making?”
“Walleye,” I said. “For the whole road.”