Page 113 of The Grumpy Defenseman
She buckled her seat belt and looked at me. “Do I need coffee for this?”
“Probably not.”
“That is not the same as reassuring.”
“I know.”
That almost got me a smile.
I drove south out of the city, past the last of the suburbs and the lit billboards along the highway. Neither of us spoke much, but the silence did not feel empty.
It felt like both of us were carrying the same thing carefully.
The turnoff came after twenty minutes. A gravel road climbed toward a ridge I had found two years ago on a night when my head had been too loud for the condo. From the top, you could see the river valley and the San Antonio skyline in the distance, bright enough to prove the city was stillthere, far enough away to make it feel survivable.
I parked at the edge of the overlook and turned off the engine.
The night was warm. Traffic moved somewhere below us, softened by distance. The city held its shape against the dark.
Sam looked out through the windshield.
“You found this place on purpose,” she said.
“I found it by accident. I kept it on purpose.”
She turned toward me then.
Waiting.
Patient in the way she was with her camera. Not passive. Just willing to sit in the space before the moment arrived.
I had spent the drive back from Clearfield thinking about what to say. Then I spent the next day wondering how much of that was fear dressed up as preparation.
So, I stopped preparing.
“I went to Clearfield,”I said.
“I know.”
“I went to the rink. Then the cemetery. Then my mother’s house.”
Her face changed at that. Not pity. Sam knew better than pity.
Attention.
“How was it?” she asked.
I looked at the skyline.
“Hard.”
She nodded once.
“Good,” I said after a second. “But hard.”
The city lights blurred slightly through the windshield, not enough to lose their shape.
“My father worked his whole life so I could have choices he didn’t have,” I said. “Somewhere along the way, I turned that into a rule. The bigger life looked from the outside, the more it honored what he gave me.”
