I glanced toward the house where I grew up. “You probably keep some liquor in the house. I don’t drink anymore. It’s easier for me if I stay out of there.”
He gave me the squint again, but this conversation wasn’t going so badly. “I can work, too,” I offered. I needed to work, of course. After buying the Dodge and factoring in the parts I needed to keep it running, my savings would take a serious hit. I’d saved most of the money I made at the orchard, since room and board were included. But I didn’t have enough to start a new life elsewhere. Yet.
I would have stayed on that farm forever, regardless. Living here above the garage, with ghosts all around me, in a town where I knew exactly where to score drugs? It was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done.
“Not much work these days,” my father said. “Got nothin’ but a scratch repair today.”
This did not surprise me. In the bad old days, even at the height of my drug addiction I’d gotten a lot of car repair done while my father “managed” the place. He must have lost customers when I’d gone to prison. There was no way he’d stepped up to keep pace with the work after my arrest.
I kept my voice neutral, because I didn’t want to piss him off. “I was thinking I could put out a sign saying I’d put on snow tires for forty bucks.”
“Might work,” he muttered.
“I’ll try it,” I said quickly.
We stared at each other for a second. I’d expected him to look a whole lot older. I don’t know why. Maybe because I felt about a hundred years old myself.
Finished with the conversation, my dad pointed toward the garage. “Gotta get back,” he said.
“Right.”
Walking away, he pointed at the Dodge. “That’s a piece of shit.”
“I noticed.”
And that was that. The weirdest father/son reunion in the world was over. Letting out a big, relieved breath, I watched his coveralls disappear into the garage. They probably hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine since I got sent to prison.
But he hadn’t turned me away. So I had that going for me.
With my duffel on my shoulder, I walked down the driveway between the house and the repair garage. Nothing here had changed, either. The paint was still peeling, and there was dead grass poking through cracks in the asphalt.
In Vermont, we called November “stick season.” It was a dark month after all the fall color had faded from the trees. The sun went down every day at 4:30, and we didn’t yet have the clean white snow to hide all our sins.
The driveway dead-ended into an alley, where the weathered exterior stairs up to my room were found. But I didn’t quite make it that far. When I turned the corner, I nearly stumbled into a small, low-slung car parked tightly against the garage’s rear wall. It was covered from bumper to bumper by a heavy black tarp.
At the sight of it, my heart climbed into my throat. My physical reaction was the same as if I’d just spotted a dead body.
In so many ways, I had.
Bending forward, I grabbed a corner of the black tarp, lifting it just a few inches. Underneath, I saw exactly what I feared—a splash of Aubergine paint. It was a factory color at Porsche in 1972.
Dropping the tarp, I took a step back, as if caught doing something illegal. I didn’t have a clue why this monument to my stupidity would be sitting here. In my mind, it had vanished along with the life it took three years ago. If I’d stopped to actually consider its whereabouts, I would have assumed that my father sold it whole for junk. He always took the lazy way out.
But here it was, right in the spot where I’d have to pass it several times a day, trying not to notice how the front passenger side was crushed from striking the tree.
At least the tarp hid the missing windshield, through which a two-hundred-pound college lacrosse player had flown to his death, his neck snapping on impact.
Just standing there, looking at the broken shell of my former life, I began to feel itchy. Not literally itchy. But “itchy” was the closest word I had for a drug craving. I felt a sort of restless tremble in my limbs and a hollowness in my chest. Some people described it as a hunger or thirst. But that wasn’t quite right, either.
Whatever you call it, there was an ache inside me that I longed to soothe. And I moved through each day a little lost, trying to fill an empty spot in my soul. But it never went away. Five months out of rehab, I still felt it all the time. It showed up when I was stressed or bored. It showed up when I was tired or underfed. Sometimes it showed up even when everything was going well.
It was never, ever going to stop. There was no cure. You just lived with it. The end.
The edges of the tarp shifted in the breeze, as if taunting me.
At rehab they always said: “Move a muscle, change a thought.” So that’s what I did. I hiked the straps of my duffel bags a little higher on my shoulder. Then I skirted the Porsche without touching it again, and took the shaky wooden stairs two at a time up to my room.