Addendum to Nowheresville

 

          I didn’t drive Lloyd straight home. I wanted us to get used to being around each other again.

          It was getting dark by the time we left Judy’s place. I drove up off of the dirt road onto 3^rd heading for the highway. I drove north up through the darkening trees and sky. We hadn’t said a word yet, either of us. I passed that right turn to Bear Creek Road and just kept driving north. We passed alternating little developments of say, twenty houses, with longer stretches of alder and fir.

          Lloyd didn’t ask me where we were going and I didn’t tell him, mostly because I didn’t know where we were going.  We were just going. He sat with his hands together between his knees, just looking out of the windows.

          I took the left turn down into Kyak Point Park.  I ignored the ticket machine. We weren’t going to be there long. It is basically a long windy narrow road under heavy foliage down to a beach with parking facing the water. In the day time during decent weather, it is a busy county park. Not this night. I drove the only vehicle that was down there.

          As I was passing about the fourth picnic shelter, dead slow, I said, “Lloyd, she never told me.” He kept sitting there with his fingers interlaced, looking at the dark salt water. I drove back up the hill and onto the two lane highway. It had been a very long day. But I didn’t want to leave it the way it was.

          “Oh, that figures, in a way,” from the other side of the cab.

          “That doesn’t excuse me. I had a hundred chances to know,” I said. “When she began showing, I had to really work at not knowing.”

          “I’m not sure now what I thought was so important. My career as a cop and a fire chief would have gone on just fine.  I had no other girlfriend either. I guess every day that it went on, it just got harder to figure out how to go to her and say, ‘what shall we do now?’ She didn’t speak, and I didn’t inquire, until today.”

          Lloyd looked tired too. His body posture was still pretty formal. He hadn’t loosened up. He had stuck his white hair into a rubber band, and I could just see his profile as he looked straight ahead.

          Finally, he said, “will you stop by the little store?” Everybody out there just called it the little store.

          I did that, and he hopped out and went in.  In five minutes, he was back with a plastic bag containing beer. He took a pack of Camels out of the bag, neatly opened the top, and lit one. He offered the pack to me, so I could help myself.  Since that seemed like a friendly gesture I took one. We smoked beside the little convenience store in the six car parking lot, in the dark with only the light from the front window of the store shining out onto the roadway.

          When he was done with his smoke, he said, “Judy is right.  The only way to deal with this is to make a good future.  None of us can change what you or she did. Or what anyone did.

          “The child is important now. Her mother is important.  I guess you must be too.” A bit of a dry laugh there.

          “I think that’s right,” I said. “It’s really all I can do, isn’t it?”

          “That’s about it, Dan,” said Lloyd.

It wasn’t getting any earlier, so I drove him to his little house, out by the new fire station.

Link to Nowheresville