I’d mixed an Irish whiskey with caramel notes with a spicy bourbon, and no regrets.
Then I sat down again and dug out my lighter and the cigar.
Nathan joined me soon enough, and he’d brought our National Parks Passport.
“That time of the year, huh?” I asked.
He smiled indulgently and took a seat next to me. “I don’t even know if there’ll be a next trip, but I’m going to pretend for a moment.”
I took a puff from the cigar and side-eyed him.
I’d become a pro at pretending. Every once in a while, I did it so well that I believed, for a hot second, that we were still together.
“We never made it to Biscayne,” he murmured, flipping through the pages.
I hummed. We’d talked about it a couple years ago, then decided it was best to go there when the youngest were a little older. So that they could enjoy it more. We’d wanted to go scuba diving and snorkeling.
We hadn’t made it to Yosemite either.
When Nathan went back to the beginning of the little book, I felt like I could read his mind. Stamp after stamp, sticker after sticker. Some doodling by the kids too.
Out of all the treasured memories we’d collected over the years, I knew that passport was going to be the one thing we’d both want in the divorce.
Countless weekends had been spent on shorter road trips and checking out nearby sites, like Shenandoah, Harpers Ferry, New River, Fort Monroe, and the list went on. And then every summer, we’d driven off. A week, ten days, sometimes two weeks. Three weeks once, when we’d done the West Coast. Redwood, Mount Rainier…
“Remember when we thought we’d lost Dylan at the Mount Rainier visitor center?”
“Oh God,” he muttered. “Those thirty seconds probably took ten years off my life.”
Yeah, same.
He flipped through a few more pages, brushing his fingers over the stickers we’d bought and some of the anecdotes he’d jotted down. Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Then he stopped at our only stamp in Georgia.
“Or when he tried to pronounce Chattahoochee,” he chuckled quietly.
“And when he succeeded, he wouldn’t fucking stop saying it.”
He laughed at that.
I smiled, even as heavy grief struck me. It wasn’t often I saw a genuine smile on his face anymore.
I rubbed at my chest and took another puff from the cigar.
The whiskey should be ready soon. I needed it.
I took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of the forest, the fire, the cigar, and the soil.
I desperately needed something to ground me, because I’d spent months and months floundering now. Always on edge, always uneasy, always lost.
Nate exhaled and closed the book, and he stared into the fire.
“I had it all figured out a few years ago,” he murmured. “This year, we were gonna do Maine and Vermont. Next year, we’d visit Big Bend in Texas—so you could climb or boulder, and Micah always wants to see new beetles and lizards. The yearafter, we’d finally get to Yosemite, and I guess… My big worry at that time was Dylan and whether he’d want to come with us once he started college.”
I swallowed hard and decided the whiskey had to be warm enough now. I went over and grabbed it, then instantly dropped it. Fuck. Yeah, it was hot. I used the sleeve of my flannel shirt to hold it instead, and I returned to my seat.
I was careful at first, testing to see if the bottle was too hot to put my lips to, but it was okay. The first swig went down so warm and smooth that I went for a second right away.
Fuck me, I needed that.
