Mom Hung Up on My Call for Help to Toast My Cousin, So I Vanished novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Bottle
Tyler found him in forty minutes.
He did not find him at the church, or the diner, or the lake where my father used to take us fishing.
He found him at the bottom of Millbrook Hill, because Tyler had read the police report at a card table the night before, and he had remembered the name.
He called me on video from the car.
I took it in the library stairwell with the door shut and Nate sitting two steps below me, not saying anything.
"Cass, look."
Tyler turned his phone.
The road was a plain two-lane with a faded stop sign, and a ditch full of goldenrod.
My father's sedan was pulled onto the gravel shoulder.
He sat on the curb in front of it in his short-sleeved shirt, with his hands hanging between his knees.
A bottle stood on the pavement beside his shoe.
It was a pint of whiskey, and the seal on the cap was still unbroken.
"Dad," Tyler said, and his voice went high. "Dad, don't."
"I haven't opened it," my father said.
He did not look up.
"I bought it at the gas station on Route 4. I've been sitting here two hours, and I can't make my hand do it."
Tyler dropped down on the curb beside him, and the picture swung to the sky and back.
"Give me that," Tyler said.
He picked up the bottle and carried it to the ditch and poured it out into the goldenrod.
The smell reached me even through the phone, or I imagined that it did.
My father watched the whiskey go.
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