ONE
The Long Road Up
BELLA
The roadto Angel’s Peak climbs like it has a grudge.
Nine thousand feet of switchback. The rented SUV was built for grocery runs, and it tells me so on every curve, the back end skating loose over new snow. My knuckles have gone bloodless on the wheel.
The radio died forty minutes ago, somewhere past the last town with a stoplight, and the silence it left behind has teeth. I fill it the way I fill the silence on the crisis line at two in the morning, when a stranger goes quiet, and I have to decide whether the quiet means peace or means they’re done talking.
You’re still here. The next breath is the only one you owe. We can do one breath.
It works better on them than on me.
Atlas whines from the back seat.
I find his eyes in the mirror. The muzzle’s gone gray. The rest of him is still that deep working-dog black, the fur over his leftshoulder grown in wrong where a scar runs under it. He’s been planted behind the passenger seat for an hour, head low, bracing into each turn like he’s done this in trucks that mattered more than mine.
He rides like a soldier on a convoy, weight forward, eyes on the middle distance.
I reach a hand back. His nose finds my palm. Cold. Certain. He doesn’t lick. He just rests there a moment, like he’s the one checking on me.
“I don’t like it either, bud.”
Six weeks.
That’s how long it’s been since a sheriff knocked on my aunt’s door two mornings after Christmas, hat in his hands, his face already doing the thing faces do when the words are bad.
I was at the stove. A dish towel hung over my shoulder. Flour caked my hands from the dough I was rolling into cinnamon buns, Jesse’s favorite.
Then the sheriff named my cousin. The kitchen tilted. The flour on my hands turned to something I couldn’t feel.
He’d come home for the holidays. That’s the part that keeps me up at night.
Jesse drove down out of these mountains with Atlas in the truck and a present for me on the seat, wrapped in paper covered in cartoon foxes.
The book I wanted.
The new one. The one I still can’t open. He sat at our table. He laughed at my uncle’s terrible jokes, the same three about thefishing trip, told every year like a liturgy. Two helpings of my aunt’s posole vanished while he swore it beat last year’s batch.
At the door on the twenty-sixth he pulled me into a hug that lifted my heels clean off the floor. He held it a beat too long. Then he pressed his mouth to the crown of my head, and his voice went soft against my hair.
Drive safe.
He meant it. My safety sat heavy on his mind.
Then he carried Atlas’s bed into the house. He set out the good kibble. He checked the latch on the back gate twice. He made sure Atlas had somewhere soft to sleep and someone to sleep beside.
He put Atlas inside with me first. After that he walked out to the garage where he’d slept as a teenager.
That’s the sentence I can’t set down.
He made sure Atlas was safe before he…
The counselor in me knows exactly what that planning means. The cousin in me won’t say it out loud. The girl he taught to bait a hook, to ride a bike, to throw a punch that landed. Saying it would make it a thing that happened, instead of a thing I keep finding ways to undo.
So now I have his dog.
