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  Roy is on about his tenth club soda. An event like this is harder when you don’t drink. I should know, because I don’t drink around Roy. At all. After all these years, I’m sure he wouldn’t care if I did. But I care.

  It’s just one of those things you do for your brother, out of respect.

  Zoe and my brother Roy always had the same clean date in the program, which is a very weird thing for a guy to share with his sponsor. But they both started their time that night Zoe walked back into the meeting and got Roy to share for the first time, and they never messed it up and had to start over from scratch.

  Zoe had a little more than thirty-five years clean and sober when she died.

  That means my brother Roy has fifty years and counting.

  He and I are talking partly about Connor and partly about Zoe Dinsmore. We have been for nearly an hour. Someone who didn’t know me so well might think I wasn’t taking Connor’s death all that hard. But Roy knows me. He knows it just hasn’t hit me yet. When Zoe died, it took me two weeks to get that she was really gone.

  The kids are all in bed, even the teenager, and I’m thinking it might be close to that moment when we can make a gracious exit. But we haven’t done it yet.

  “You think her old place is still standing out in the woods?” he asks me.

  I’m more than a little bit surprised by the question.

  “Yeah, of course it is. I go by it every day on my run.”

  “Why do you take the same path every day?”

  Roy is not a guy who would take the same path every day.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just do. I thought you knew.”

  “No, I knew you run every day. But I’m not out there following you, you know. I figured you mixed it up.”

  “Be right back,” I say.

  I get up and walk across the room to Dorothy, Connor’s oldest. She knows why. She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek and thanks me for coming. Like that was ever in question. Like that could ever in a million years have been in question.

  Then I shoot Roy a signal that we’re leaving, and he meets me at the door.

  “Come on,” I say. “I’ll take you home. We’ll go the long way.”

  Being a hardware man means always having a good, strong flashlight in your glove compartment.

  I take us out via the River Road, because that’s the shortest walk.

  For what it’s worth, Roy walks fine. He still has a limp after all these years, but you’d almost have to be focusing on it to notice.

  He uses a sort of prosthetic that goes inside his shoe, so he can balance well when he walks. After fifty years you can imagine he’s had a lot of practice with it. But he still takes it off as soon as he’s not in public, so I think it’s always bothered him a little. Maybe more than he lets on. Once he told me a few details about it, and it has something to do with the nerve endings at the point of that amputation. But he doesn’t like to talk about that, because it makes him feel like a complainer.

  He still keeps more of his insides to himself than I might’ve hoped for, but things like that are never a zero-sum game. You get progress, you be grateful for it. In the realm of wounded humans, you’re never going to have it all.

  Also, I should note that in my opinion, we’re all wounded humans. The rest is just a matter of degree.

  He never married. He keeps to his own company and seems to get by okay, considering that okay is also a relative term.

  He drives fine, too, though he needs an automatic transmission because he drives with his left foot. It makes him nervous to have something as vital as a brake pedal operated by a part of his shoe that doesn’t even have a foot in it. That he can’t even feel.

  The only reason I drove him to the funeral is because his truck wouldn’t start.

  “We’re seriously going out there in the dark?” he asks as I park on the shoulder of the road.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “But why are we doing this again?”

  “Because you didn’t even know if it was still standing. And because it is. And because it brings back so many memories, you won’t be able to believe it. It just brings her back so crystal clear in your mind, you feel like she might be standing right behind you. Like you might turn around and slam right into her.”

  He nods a couple of times. I can see it in the dash lights as I turn off the ignition.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’d say I’m up for that.”

  “What happened to the floor?” Roy asks me.

  “Drifters,” I say. “It’s been broken into a couple of times.”

  We’re sitting with our backs up against the wall where the head of Zoe’s bed used to be. Roy started a fire in the old potbellied stove with some ancient kindling that got left behind on the hearth. It’s very dry, that kindling. It’s possibly had as much as twenty-five years’ worth of drying time. It’s burning hot, but it won’t burn long, and that’s just as well. We don’t plan to sit here all night.

  “What did they want to go and mess up the floor for, though?” he asks. He sounds like a kid who thinks something isn’t fair.

  “I have no idea.”

  He’s pulling off his right shoe, which is not a surprise. Like I said, he always does when the opportunity presents itself. His sock has been shortened, a process he performs himself with scissors, a darning egg, and yarn, so all that extra sock doesn’t bunch up and irritate him.

  “Who owns this now?”

  “Grandkids,” I say.

  “They’re not doing anything with it, though.”

  “Not at the moment, no. But I figure one of these days one of them’ll need the money they could get for the land. That’s another reason I figured we should come out here sooner rather than later.”

  “Here’s a question,” Roy says. “How come so many people we know are dying?”

  I laugh out loud. I can’t help it.

  “What’s funny?” he asks.

  “You are. It’s because we’re old, Roy.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he says. “I’m not that old.”

  “You’re going to turn seventy next year.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Yeah. Wow. I guess that is pretty old. When did we get to be so old?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s crazy. We always used to be so young.”

  For a while we talk about Mom, and I’m not sure why.

  “I told you about the last time I got to see her,” he says. “The last time I got to talk to her. You never did. You kept those cards close to your vest.”

  Our mom died in 1998. She was living in a nursing home by then, and her mind had mostly gone. Every now and then it would come back in a flash, and she’d know who I was. But before I could mount a response to that momentous occasion, she’d be gone again.

  When the nursing home called to say a last visit had better happen soon if we wanted one, Roy and I had to go see her separately because of our work schedules.

  Honestly, I wasn’t trying to play those cards close to my vest. I figured I’d told him.

  “Well . . . ,” I begin. Trying to bring back details as I go. “I sat beside her bed and watched her fade in and out, and at first I didn’t say anything, because I thought she was too far gone to hear me. Then I figured at least her spirit was still there.

  “So I said, ‘Hey, Mom. It’s me, Lucas. I came to say goodbye.’

  “She turned her head toward me and looked me dead in the eye, and she said, clear as a bell, ‘I know I wasn’t a good mother and I’m sorry.’”

  “Holy crap,” he says. “How do you answer a statement like that?”

  “I know, right?”

  Now, I had a lot of anger toward my mom. I won’t lie about that. She was not a good mother, and in most other moments of my life I would have agreed with her. Just straight out. But I think a parent needs something different on her deathbed. In the absence of actual abuse, I think in that final moment if you can’t see it’s not about you, then you’re just not
living the right kind of life. I could get into therapy and tell my counselor how unhelpful she was for the rest of my days, but this was my last chance ever to say something to my mom.

  I tell Roy, “I fell back on something Zoe Dinsmore said to me, and in defense of you, by the way. I quoted it word for word, as best my memory allowed. Except I only repeated the first half of the thing. ‘We’re all just doing our best.’ I left out the second part. ‘Even if it doesn’t look so good from the outside.’ Because why plant the negative part of the thought in her head at a time like that?”

  “You think she heard you?”

  “I have no idea if she heard it. I have no idea if she took any of it in. But I know they were the right words at the right time. And besides, I heard it.”

  “Remember that thing with Zoe at your track meet?” he asks me.

  The fire is beginning to die down, but we’re making no move toward leaving.

  “Which one? She was at practically every meet.”

  So was Roy, but I don’t say that out loud, because he was there, so he knows.

  “The one where that kid’s father said something . . . unpleasant to me?”

  Roy didn’t get to keep his war hero status. Word got around. But it was okay, he told me years later. Much the same as jail and that dressing-down from Dad was okay for me. It’s the price we paid. It’s the price we chose.

  “Remember what Zoe did?” he asks when I don’t answer.

  “I was out on the track, but I remember hearing about it. But I don’t remember what she was supposed to have said.”

  “She didn’t say anything. That was the beauty of the whole deal. She got between him and me and just stood there facing him with her arms crossed over her chest. And she never said a word. And he said every word under the sun. He tried reasoning with her. Then he made fun of her. Then he tried getting mad, or at least pretending he was mad. Then he started telling her she was crazy, because she never said a word. She barely even blinked. Then finally he got freaked out by the whole thing and just . . . you know . . . retreated. It was amazing.”

  “She was a scary woman,” I say.

  And it’s funny the way I say it, because it’s in this wistful voice, like I miss her and that was the best compliment I’ve got in the box. Well, I do miss her. Every day. But I’m sure I could think of better ways to express it than that.

  “Boy, you can say that twice,” Roy says. “That lady was a force of nature. Why do you think I stayed clean all those years? I would’ve been too scared to go and tell her I messed up.”

  “But she’s been gone fifteen years, and you’re still clean.”

  “Knowing Zoe, she’d haunt me.”

  “I get it,” I say. Then I add something that’s sort of tickling at the edges of my thoughts. “If she was so terrifying, which she totally was, and we were such cowards, which we totally were, how did we manage to love her so much?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. She was on our side.” While I’m pondering the truth of that, he says, “You won’t have a best friend anymore.”

  I notice that the last of the embers are winking out. It’s dark in here now. My flashlight is turned off. And I’m not answering.

  “You’ve had a best friend since you were three,” he adds. “Now what?”

  “I have the dogs,” I say. “And you.”

  “I’m not sure if I’m best friend material.”

  “You’ll do,” I say, a little sarcastically.

  Then I bump his knee in a signal that it’s probably time to get up and go home.

  He puts his right shoe back on and struggles to his feet. I reach out a hand to help him, but he doesn’t seem to notice it in the dark. Just as well. He doesn’t need it. He’s been getting to his feet on his own since before I was born. I’m not sure what I thought I was doing with that.

  He says, “Ask around town, and most people’ll tell you I’m not best friend material.”

  “Yeah, but some of them told me the same thing about Connor.”

  “Oh,” he says. And in that moment he pauses in his movement toward the door. “That’s right, isn’t it? And they sure were wrong about him.”

  “It’s really important,” I say, “when you’re thinking bad thoughts about yourself, to remember that they might turn out to be wrong.”

  We’re standing outside, taking one last look. The stars are just wild. There are millions of them, really sharp and clear between the trees. I’ve never stood beside the cabin at night before. Not once in all these years.

  I think, No wonder she loved it out here so much.

  And then after the fact, I realize I said it out loud.

  “Yeah,” he says. He’s looking up, too. “People think she did it to punish herself, but I know she really loved it out here. It may have started as penance, but this became her place. You were right when you said you feel like you’ll bump into her when you turn around. It feels almost like she’s still here.”

  I’m looking half at the stars and half at the chimney, imagining smoke coming out of it the way it used to in the winter. Or even on a few cool summer evenings. And, yes, I’m positive I’m imagining it. We made sure our fire was out so we didn’t burn down the cabin and the whole forest with it.

  I turn on the flashlight and shine it all around again for one last look. Because, even though I guess I could be wrong, I get the feeling that it’s my last look.

  The sweep of the light touches on something. A flash of color. I keep the light trained in that direction. On either side of Zoe’s outhouse there’s a riot of untended flowers growing. Colored blooms on long stalks. Some are yellow. Others are purple or red.

  Roy comes up behind me. I can hear his footsteps in the dry leaves.

  “Whoa,” he says. “I thought those would die without her, but they’ve really taken off since she was gone. There used to be just a little tended patch of them hidden behind the outhouse.”

  “Which explains why I never saw them.”

  “But you knew, right? You knew she grew flowers and left them on the two graves. Right?”

  “I did and I didn’t,” I say.

  And he knows me too well to ask for a clarification of that.

  I turn off the flashlight. We hang in this place for a time, our eyes adjusting to the darkness again. I can feel how neither one of us really wants to leave.

  “You know,” Roy says. And then pauses. “That wasn’t true what you said to Dotty today.”

  “What did I say to Dotty that wasn’t true?”

  “You did more than just introduce Connor to Zoe. You saved Zoe’s life. It’s only because of you that she even survived long enough for you to introduce him.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Right. I guess I wasn’t considering that part of the thing.”

  “If you hadn’t developed that weird habit of running with somebody else’s dogs, she would have died in her cabin that day, and there would have been nobody to pull our butts out of the fire. We probably would’ve lost Connor. And I’m not sure if I would’ve gotten clean. Or how I would’ve turned out if I hadn’t.”

  I look away from the stars and the chimney. The wild stalks of flowers. Then, with no real outward signal to each other that we’re about to do it, we make our way back toward the road together.

  I don’t turn on the flashlight again. Our eyes are adjusted to the lack of light, and besides, if there’s anybody who knows how to navigate a dark night, it’s me and my brother.

  “I wouldn’t have been running with somebody else’s dogs if Mom would’ve gotten me one of my own,” I say as we reach the River Road together.

  “Then it’s a damn good thing she wouldn’t get you one of your own.”

  And in this one perfect but probably fleeting moment . . . nothing in my life has ever been a mistake.

  STAY BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  In this book the author highlights how a single choice can alter the path of one’s life. How might Lucas’s life have been different had he not chosen
to take a shortcut through the woods and encountered two strange dogs?

  In the face of life-threatening circumstances in Vietnam, Roy makes a choice that ensures he will be sent home. How does this action, coupled with keeping the truth a secret, affect his life going forward?

  As a boy growing up, starting at a young age, Lucas felt responsible for everyone and everything. In what ways did his family dynamics play into this type of behavior?

  In contrast, his best friend, Connor, chose a completely different way to cope, leading nearly to a tragic end. What was missing in both boys’ homelife? How did meeting Zoe help fill that void for both of them?

  For many years, Zoe has carried the guilt of being responsible for the death of two young children. Do you think one can ever make amends for something so heartbreaking? Ultimately, how did this tragedy shape her to become the person Lucas and Connor come to rely on?

  Lucas interprets the dogs’ facial expressions about Zoe to mean: “Well, we all know how she is, don’t we? We know how she can be, but we love her all the same.” He goes on to observe “that’s what you really do get from dogs.” What do you think the author was trying to convey in this passage?

  During the second part of the book, it is revealed that Lucas felt so strongly about his conviction not to fight in the Vietnam War, he chose instead to go to prison. This was a brave choice during those turbulent times. Was his decision worth the consequences?

  At the end of Lucas’s retelling of his life, Harris remarks that everyone dies in Lucas’s story. Lucas replies, “But I still have to say it’s not devastating that people and animals live and then die . . . It’s hard, but those are the rules of the game.” And then he thinks, If you think having and losing is so bad, try never having. Now that’s devastating. Do you agree or disagree with Lucas’s philosophy on life?