Next Time Away novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: The Back Seat
Dagny hugged Elsie at the bottom of the steps and thanked me twice.
I let her.
I kept my face smooth and my voice kind, and I stood on the porch holding the door frame until the van's lights had turned onto the shore road.
Then I went back to the kitchen table and looked at the purple drawing.
I did not sleep that night either.
In the morning I buckled Greta into her seat and drove the green truck up the lake to the Reiten boat dock.
It was a gray shed on pilings with three hulls up on stands and a woodstove ticking in the corner.
Jonas stood under a boat with a sander in his hand.
He turned it off when he saw me in the doorway with the carrier.
"You shouldn't be driving," he said.
"I shouldn't do a lot of things."
I set the drawing on his workbench, between a coffee can of screws and a wrench.
He looked at it for a long time.
He read the truck and the ice and the tall stick figure at the wheel.
A vein stood out on the back of his scarred hand.
"Who was driving, Jonas?" I said.
"I was."
"Elsie says Soren."
"Elsie is six."
"You told me the report says you were drunk," I said. "You never told me you were."
He turned his back on me and put the sander down on the bench.
"Tove."
"You said you believed the rest was yours to carry. What's the rest?"
The woodstove ticked.
On the floor, Greta made a small sleepy noise.
He turned around.
His face had gone the color of the ice in the drawing.
"We were at the fish house," he said. "The three of us. He and Soren had been fighting all night about Dagny, and I never knew what. Soren was drunk. I'd had two beers."
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