Lost Along the Way Sexton

127 Pages·2015·2.69 MB·English

by  Scott R J

Acknowledgments

WITH HEARTFELT gratitude to:
Wendy Russo, for giving Amber and me the idea.
Amber, for being such a fantastic drinking buddy.
Alanna Coca, for helping more than I can say with the Laramie angle.
Larissa Ione and Shae Connor, for being my weather gurus.
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

3
Prologue

February

A RINGING phone at three in the morning is never good news.
The first ring jarred me awake.
Next to me, Chase moaned and buried his head under a pillow.
“What the hell? Who would call at this time of night?”
I fumbled for my cell phone, which lay on my bedside table. One
glance at the screen made my adrenaline surge. I sat upright in bed. Chase,
sensing my alarm, peeked at me from under his pillow.
“Who is it?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep.
That was a good question. It was a 307 area code, which meant
Wyoming, but it wasn’t a number I recognized. My first thought was that
it was coming from the Laramie hospital. It had to be my mom, calling to
tell me my dad had suffered a heart attack. Or my dad, calling to tell me
my mother had fallen on her way into the bathroom and broken her hip.
“Daniel?” Chase said, sitting up to put his hand on my shoulder.
“Honey, what is it?”
The phone rang a third time. I chose to answer it rather than Chase.
“Hello?”
“Danny?” asked a male voice I didn’t recognize. “Is this Danny
Whitaker?”
Nobody called me Danny anymore, but it was a moot point. Alarm
made my heart pound. “Yes. Who’s this?”
“This is Landon Kushner, from Laramie. I live across the street from
your parents.” He stopped, and I knew he was searching for words. “I’m
afraid I have some terrible news.”
It was worse than I’d feared. My parents were dead, Landon told me.
Both of them killed in a multicar crash on I-80, a bit west of Sidney,
Nebraska.
“But…,” I stammered, “why were they in Nebraska?”
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

“They were on their way home4 fr om visiting relatives in Omaha.”
“Oh.” I felt silly for having asked such a dumb question. They’d
both been born and raised in Omaha. My mother still had a sister there,
and my father had two brothers. Still, it seemed unreal. I swallowed again,
trying to sort out what I was feeling. Mostly, I was numb. The grief would
come, I knew, but not yet. “How do you know all this?”
“I was watching their house for them while they were away. They
should have been home hours ago. I had a feeling….” He stopped, and I
heard him take a deep, quavering breath. “I guess the Nebraska Highway
Patrol wasn’t sure who to notify, but they eventually contacted the
Laramie PD, and they sent somebody to your parents’ house. I just
finished talking to them.”
“Oh my God.” After years of being semi-estranged, my parents and I
had finally started speaking again only a few months before. It had started
with a phone call on Thanksgiving and another on Christmas. The most
recent call had been on my birthday in January. Mom had asked hopefully
if I’d come for the Fourth of July. “We’ll have a barbecue and then go
downtown for Jubilee Days.” She’d hesitantly added, “Chase is invited
too, of course.”
It was the one thing I’d been waiting for: the final acknowledgement
that after nearly fifteen years together, Chase was my family as much as
they were. For years it had felt like I had to choose him or them. Finally,
in the last few months, it had started to look like I’d be able to have both.
But it wasn’t to be.
At least we’d spoken. At least they hadn’t died believing I hated
them. Still, it was wrong. How could they be gone when we were so close
to reconciling?
Chase moved to sit next to me, his hand warm and comforting on my
back. He handed me a tissue. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.
“Danny,” Landon said hesitantly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.”
The next couple of days were a blur of phone calls—distant family
members, the coroner from the Sidney hospital, Landon, and my parents’
lawyer, who informed me that my parents had purchased plots five years
earlier in a cemetery in their hometown of Omaha. Although my parents
had moved to Laramie when I was five and lived there for the next thirty-
two years, it seemed they’d never quite considered it their home.
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

Strange that I still did, after all t5h is time. And yet there was no need to
go back yet, although I’d have to eventually. Their house and everything in
it belonged to me.
For now there were arrangements to be made. Several stages of grief
to suffer through. A memorial service to arrange in Omaha, and an entire
family to deal with.
The house would have to wait.
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

6
Chapter 1

May

IT WAS not a dark and stormy night. Somehow that would have been
appropriate. It certainly would have suited my mood on the day I was
fated to return to my hometown to deal with my parents’ cluttered house,
but it simply wasn’t the case. Instead, the sun shone bright in the cloudless
Colorado sky as if to spite me.
I wrapped up my shift at the news station, smiling as I gave the
afternoon weather report for the Denver area—10 percent chance of
showers in the evening, cooling to the high fifties overnight—and a
forecast for the next day of mostly clear skies, 30 percent chance of
afternoon storms, highs in the midseventies. All in all a typical day for late
May. Then I made my way to my office with my heart full of dread.
I didn’t want to do this, but I’d already put it off too long. Landon
had generously taken care of it for me since their deaths, but it was time
for me to deal with it, once and for all.
Chase called at four o’clock, just as I was removing my makeup with
a baby wipe. He often teased me about having to wear it, as if it was only
about covering up the wrinkles that were beginning to form at the corners
of my eyes, but it was more than that. The camera could be brutal.
“I thought I’d grill some burgers for dinner,” he said. “We’re out of
buns, though. Can you stop on your way home?”
“You bet.” An early dinner would be perfect. We could be on the
road before six.
“Get some coffee too.”
“Okay.”
“Are you leaving soon?”
“In a few minutes.”
“Good. See you in a few.”
“Love you.”
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

“Bye.” 7
The conversation took less than twenty seconds and was as routine
for me as drinking a cup of coffee in the morning. Although the law
prevented Chase and me from being legally married, we’d called each
other “husband” for the last fifteen years.
No, I wasn’t looking forward to returning to Laramie, but at least I’d
have Chase by my side. We’d been floundering lately. Not arguing,
exactly. We didn’t talk enough to argue. But we’d become depressingly
mechanical and complacent in our relationship. We’d become little more
than roommates. I hoped a few days away from our normal routine would
shake us out of it.
I stopped at Safeway on my way home as requested. Hamburger
buns were easy, but as I stood debating the shelves and shelves of
coffee—caramel cream or hazelnut biscotti?—I felt a tap on my elbow.
“Are you Daniel Whitaker?” a middle-aged woman in jogging
clothes asked.
“Yes.”
“The Channel 9 weatherman?”
“Meteorologist,” I said, as my heart sank. I could tell by her tone this
was going to hurt.
“It was supposed to rain yesterday, and it never did. I missed my
afternoon run because you said it was going to rain.”
“I said 70 percent chance of afternoon showers.” And personally, I’d
argued for lowering our prediction to 60 percent, but I’d been overridden
by the senior meteorologist at the station.
She crossed her arms and tapped her toe. “But it didn’t.”
“It did. It just didn’t reach this far north. It was more in Castle Rock
and Parker.”
“But not here.”
I resisted the urge to sigh, or to explain to her that “70 percent
chance of showers” meant only that the predicted probability of more
than a measurable amount of precipitation—defined as more than one
one-hundredth of an inch—in any one point of the forecast area
averaged out to 70 percent. We’d been 90 percent sure of rain in the
southeastern portion of the city, but only 40 to 50 percent sure in the
northwestern regions, which boiled down to a glib “70 percent chance”
for the forecast.
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

“We can put a man on the mo8o n, but we can’t predict tomorrow’s
weather,” she grumbled as she walked away. “Maybe one of these days
you’ll get it right.”
I brooded over the conversation all the way home. Everybody knows
the jokes about meteorologists: Why did the weatherman get fired?
Because the climate didn’t agree with him. What do you do when you get
every answer wrong on your SAT? Become a weatherman. Who does
everybody listen to, but nobody believe? You guessed it.
The weatherman.
As usual it wasn’t that our forecast had been inaccurate, but many
viewers don’t understand basic forecast terminology. They also don’t
seem to realize how difficult it could be to take massive meteorological
and climatological events in an area as large and geographically varied as
ours and boil them down to a three-minute forecast. If we’d only had to
predict the weather for the one hundred fifty-five square miles that made
up the City of Denver, it would have been easy, but our forecast area
covered the entire state of Colorado—an impressive one hundred four
thousand square miles—and stretched as far north as Laramie, Wyoming.
Even in the greater metro area of Denver, what happened in one suburb
could be vastly different than what happened in the others. It was the most
frustrating part of my job. We were predicting the future, for fuck sake.
Even though we got it right 90 percent of the time, people only ever talked
about the 10 percent of the time when we didn’t.
I was still replaying the conversation in my head, imagining all the
ways I could have contradicted the jogger, as I pulled into my driveway.
Before going inside, I strolled down to the sidewalk to check the mail. My
neighbor was there as well, just locking the little square door on her box.
“Evening, Daniel,” she said, without glancing up at me. She was
flipping through her stack of envelopes.
“Hi, Lydia.”
“Not going to get any hail tonight, are we?” Lydia had moved to
Colorado from San Diego only a few months before and seemed to live in
fear of one of Colorado’s outlandish hailstorms shattering the skylight in
her bedroom as she slept. Never mind that the worst hail usually stayed
northeast of us, where Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska collided in an
area known to weather buffs as Hail Alley. Denver had apparently seen
enough golf ball-sized hail over the years to make Lydia nervous.
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

“Probably not.” 9
“Thank goodness.” She sighed and waved her stack of envelopes at
me. “All junk. Every single piece.”
“Isn’t that always the way?”
Lydia was three steps away when she stopped and turned back. “I
meant to tell you, Daniel. You might want to get your engine checked.”
“What?”
“I was walking Rio the other day, and I noticed there was oil in your
driveway, right where you usually park.”
“Oh. Thanks for letting me know.”
Back at the house, I tried to spot the oil stain, but with my Subaru
parked right on top of it, there wasn’t much to see. My car was only a few
years old. None of the little alert lights had been on, and I’d had all the usual
maintenance done at prescribed intervals. I didn’t know the first thing about
cars, and Lydia’s warning about the oil leak worried me. Laramie was only
a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home in Westminster, but the last
thing I needed was engine trouble along the way.
I found Chase in the kitchen, patting ground beef into patties.
“How was your day?” he asked as I set the bag from the grocery
store onto the counter.
“Wonderful. I had another argument with Grant about the five-day
forecast. I was reminded that my job is to read off his prediction rather
than formulating my own.” I ticked the points off on my fingers. “The
station manager suggested I lose a few pounds. The makeup girl told me
the wrinkles around my eyes are now so pronounced she needs the
extraheavy concealer to cover them. And I was ambushed in the coffee
aisle by a fair-weather jogger.”
“All in a day’s work.” He pushed the plate of patties aside and used
his wrist to nudge the faucet handle on the kitchen sink in order to wash
his hands, which were coated with congealed fat from the raw hamburger.
I stepped forward to squirt a drop of dish soap into his palm.
“Are you packed and ready to go?” I asked.
“Well, no. I needed to talk to you about that.” He kept his eyes on
his hands as he washed. “The restaurant called today. One of the
waitresses broke her collarbone in a bicycle accident—”
“Ouch.”
“—and now they’re short-staffed for the weekend.”
Marie Sexton
Lost Along the Way |

My heart sank. “But you ask1ed0 for the time off. We already have
plans.”
He turned off the water and finally faced me as he dried his hands on
a kitchen towel. “I know, hun. I’m sorry. But I’m low man on the pole,
and after the row I had with the manager last weekend, I can’t afford to
push my luck.” He set the towel aside and stepped forward to put his hand
on my arm. “It’s not like this’ll be your only trip back. I’ll request a
weekend off at the beginning of July, okay?”
I nodded jerkily, trying not to take it personally. After all it wasn’t
Chase’s fault somebody had broken their collarbone.
No, said a small voice in my head, but he sure jumped at the chance
to stay home, didn’t he?
Well, I couldn’t blame him for that, either. Who wanted to spend an
entire weekend locked in a musty old house, sorting through boxes of who
knew what, dwelling on somebody else’s memories? Even I would have
jumped at the opportunity to stay home. And as he’d said, cleaning out my
parents’ house and getting it ready to sell would probably take several
weekends.
Still, I was disappointed. Having a couple of days away with Chase
had been the only bright spot for me in an otherwise depressing weekend.
But there was nothing to be done about it now.
“You’re right,” I said at last. “There’ll be plenty of other weekends.”

THERE ARE two options when driving from Colorado to Laramie, assuming
one doesn’t want to take single-lane county roads the whole way. One is to
go straight north on I-25 to Cheyenne, then take I-80 west. The interstates
are fast, direct, and boring as hell. The other option is to cut through Fort
Collins on Highway 287. The latter route is shorter by about thirty miles,
but the drive times are about the same. If I’d been driving at night, I
probably would have opted for the interstates, where I was less likely to
have deer, antelope, or coyote jumping into my path, but with daylight still
left, I decided to take the more scenic option.
It’d been nearly fifteen years since I’d driven this road, and I was struck
by how perfectly familiar and welcoming it felt, winding my way through the
rolling, dusty foothills. A few trees in the creek beds and a lot of sagebrush
were the only hints of green. The reddish-gray earth contrasted with the bright