Michelle Huneven

Lewis Fletcher was waiting to be discharged from the Ventura County Social Model Detoxification Facility. Nobody could explain this name to him. “Social” as opposed to what? Asocial? Antisocial? Unsocial? Yesterday, they—or at least this guy Bobby—told him he’d be able to walk right out come nine o’clock this morning. Walk right out to freedom. Sky. Sidewalk underfoot. Well-aimed sun. Coffee shops. Then, Bobby said, some stuff about him came in over the computer, and now it was known he’d had too many alcohol-related offenses to be released on his own recognizance.

Eight years ago, a private investigator sobered up at Round Rock and Red let the man work off his bill in trade. Red asked him to locate his father, an assignment both assumed would result in the address of a cemetery. Within a week, however, Jack was found traversing the country in a mid-size motor home with a Choctaw woman named Winnie. Red sent a telegram to a Kansas KOA campground, and ten days later Jack and Winnie rolled into Round Rock. Almost forty years had passed since Red had seen his father. Jack was now a fragile stick of a man, face wattled in loose skin, head crowned by a wavering white flame of hair. Jack and Winnie parked the motor home next to Red’s bungalow and drank gin around the clock until Red had to ask them to leave. Two years later, Red was summoned to Monrovia to identify his father’s body and collect his possessions: one green woolen overcoat, one pair of black steel-shank boots, sixteen dollars and change.

He started down the road to Round Rock in deepening blue twilight, up and down a series of shallow dips. He heard a truck grinding closer; then the beams of its headlights crisscrossed above his head. Coming over the hill, he saw not only the truck but a whole house moving toward him. Clapboard siding, window shuttered with plywood. He recognized it, of course: a Round Rock bungalow, his old girlfriend’s new home. Standing on the shoulder of the road, he watched this slow, twilight procession, regret filling his mouth with the taste of rusty window screens. As the house passed, he had an urge to hop inside. That way, when the house was set down and Libby walked across the porch to open the front door, he could step right up. “Hello, dear.”