But hearing it under the floodlights, with the old jail in front of me and men in leather watching from the shadows, makes it real in a way the road did not.
A dead man.
My arms tighten around August.
Derby’s face changes.
Just a little.
Enough.
The noise of the yard seems to thin out. Laughter still rolls from the porch. Music thumps low somewhere inside the building. Men talk. Glass clinks. A bike engine pops in the distance. But all of it moves far away, like I’m underwater and Derby has just cut the rope holding me to the surface.
“You already said that,” I whisper.
His jaw works once. “Yeah.”
“On the road.”
“I know.”
“And somehow I still thought…” I stop because the rest is too pitiful to say out loud.
Somehow I still thought maybe he was wrong. For some reason, I still thought the night had taken its fill and would relinquish one thing. I still imagined, bizarrely, that a girl could be late and the dad-shaped ghost would still be there.
Derby says nothing.
That silence is kinder than most words would be.
I shift August higher on my hip, but my hand slips against his pajama shirt. I have to grip him tighter. He makes a confused sound and pats my neck.
“Mama?”
“I’m okay,” I say.
I’m not.
It’s ridiculous because I don’t know the man I came here to find.
That should make this easier.
Legendary Mike Welles isn’t bedtime stories and school pictures. He isn’t scraped knees and birthday candles and a hand on my shoulder at graduation. He’s a name my mother said differently depending on how much she’d been drinking and how lonely the night was. Sometimes she said it with anger. With longing, at times. Sometimes with a laugh that made me thinkshe had once been a girl who believed in dangerous men because she had not yet learned how danger stays after the charm leaves.
Your daddy was something, she used to say.
Not good.
Not bad.
Something.
As a child, I imagined him ten different ways.
A hero. A villain. A famous wrestler throwing men across a ring while the crowd screamed his name. A biker in leather with women hanging off him. A man who did not know about me. A man who knew and did not care. A man who might open a door one day, see my face, and realize he had missed me.
That last version was the stupidest.
It was also the one I carried longest.