Pete nodded, looking up at Dale, his face drawn and pale, those brown eyes sad and dim.
In those eyes, Dale searched for the memory of what they’d once shared, those laughs at school, hanging around their shared locker. The time they snuck off campus to go to McDonalds, surely the most forbidden of treats, particularly during school hours. When they’d experimented with pot just before band class.
When they’d both signed up to try out for the baseball team, and both failed miserably. But they’d snuck a bottle of Pete’s mom’s gin and hung out at the baseball field, sitting on the bleachers in the moonlight, just about holding hands as they traded that small bottle back and forth. Dale had not minded not playing baseball, not as long as he had this.
Some of those memories seemed to hang in the air between them, sweet, ethereal strands stretching between his heart and Pete’s as though in an effort to twine them together forever–and then Pete coughed again, his whole body shaken with it.
“Okay.” Dale stood up and clasped his hands together as if finalizing a to-do list in his head. “Girls, can you go grab your backpacks or whatever, and pack for a few days? I’m taking you and your daddy to my house till the storm blows over.”
“You have to–” Pete paused to cough. “You have to help them.”
“You wait on the couch, then,” said Dale. “I’ll help them and then you.”
Pete seemed obedient in his silence as Dale followed Rebecca’s tugging hand to a little room at the other end of the trailer. The room was at the north end of the trailer, so was getting the brunt of a cold wind whistling down from the mountains,which made him even more desperate to get them all out of there.
He was shown two backpacks, one that was blue with a white haired girl on it, the other that was pink with a girl with red hair on it. Disney, he suspected, but he saw that they’d not really unpacked, which meant that the little family had arrived only recently, perhaps even the night before.
Silently, he picked up both backpacks, and looked at the little girls.
“Is everything still in these?” he asked. They nodded solemnly and silently at him, so he led them back into the living room, where he spied a hard-sided suitcase on wheels. This suitcase was opened a little way at the top as if Pete had started digging around for something, medicine maybe, and then just stopped.
He zipped the suitcase up, and said, “I’m loading these and I’ll be right back.”
He tromped out of the trailer into the face of a hard, slanted, ice-drenched wind, and tucked the backpacks and suitcases in the truck bed where they wouldn’t fall out.
When he turned, he realized that Rebecca and Melanie had followed him outside, holding hands, two silent sentinels in the snow.
Instead of sending them back inside, because what was the point, he loaded them into the back seat of his four-door pickup and buckled them both in. They didn’t say a word, which was kind of freaking him out, but maybe the whole thing was kind of freaking them out.
“We’re going to be fine,” he said, pulling the old black and red checked blanket he kept back there over their knees.
“What about Daddy?” asked Melanie, her eyes worried.
“I’m going to get him right now,” he said. “We’ll be on our way in two minutes.”
He went back inside, where Pete was standing, wobbling ashe attempted to pull on a dingy green crewneck sweater over his head.
“Sit down,” said Dale, his voice on the verge of being hard-edged, his worry and concern rolling themselves into a little storm of panic. “Shoes?”
Pete sat down on the couch, pointed at a spot by the door, where a pair of tasseled loafers rested in a small, citified heap.
Dale’s mouth opened to start a speech about how Pete should have known better, at this time of year especially, just about Christmas, than to be driving anywhere in Wyoming without good footwear. What if his car had broken down and he needed to get out to look at the engine? Which led Dale to question what he’d seen, or rather not seen, in the yard.
“Where’s your car?” asked Dale as he bent at Pete’s feet and gently rubbed his ankles, tugging his fancy, thin socks up all the way.
“Taxi,” said Pete, breathing hard, like he was trying to hold back a cough. “From town.”
“Did you come by bus?” asked Dale, already knowing the answer was yes. The Greyhound bus station was on the other side of the highway, and perhaps the taxi had gone by the grocery store, which might explain how Melanie and Rebecca had decided to head in that direction.
At Pete’s nod, Dale made himself stop asking questions, or even wondering about them. His job was to get the four of them back to his place before the snow really started to come down.
He’d keep his memories about him and Pete to himself, at least until Pete was better, and maybe not even then. Pete didn’t deserve having to explain himself to Dale, especially since he was obviously on his last legs, having come to a situation where bringing his daughters to a shithole of a trailer on the outskirts of a very small, nothing-ever-happens-here town had been his only option.
Dale did his best to wrestle those tasseled shoes onto Pete’sfeet. But the shoes were hopelessly misshapen, having not been stuffed with rags as they were allowed to dry.
He gave up on that, stood up, and stood close while he grabbed the wool coat from the back of the couch, and helped Pete put it on. For good measure, he wrapped the thin blanket around Pete’s shoulders like a cape. Then he picked Pete up in his arms, ignoring Pete’s squawk of surprise, and hauled him bodily out to the truck, buckling him in, and shutting the door.
The only reason he went back to the trailer to shut the door solidly was because it was the right thing to do. Just because it was a shitty trailer didn’t mean that Pete would appreciate Dale mistreating his property. And maybe Pete would want to come back and fix the place up so he could live within a ten or fifteen minute drive from Dale forever and ever.
