grabbed Rose by the arms and whirled her around, making her hair fly. “I got her! Just for a few seconds, but it was her!”
“Did you see the uncle?”
“No, she was looking out the windshield at the mountains. She said they were beautiful—”
“They are,” Rose said. A grin was spreading on her lips. “Don’t you agree, Charlie?”
“—and he said they sure were. They’re coming, Rosie! They really are!”
“Did she know you were there?”
He let go of her, frowning. “I can’t say for sure . . . Grampa Flick probably could . . .”
“Just tell me what you think.”
“Probably not.”
“That’s good enough for me. Go someplace quiet. Someplace where you can concentrate without being disturbed. Sit and listen. If—when—you pick her up again, let me know. I don’t want to lose track of her if I can help it. If you need more steam, ask for it. I saved a little.”
“No, no, I’m fine. I’ll listen. I’ll listen hard!” Token Charlie gave a rather wild laugh and rushed off. Rose didn’t think he had any idea where he was going, and she didn’t care. As long as he kept listening.
13
Dan and Billy were at the foot of the Flatirons by noon. As he watched the Rockies draw closer, Dan thought of all the wandering years he had avoided them. That in turn made him think of some poem or other, one about how you could spend years running, but in the end you always wound up facing yourself in a hotel room, with a naked bulb hanging overhead and a revolver on the table.
Because they had time, they left the freeway and drove into Boulder. Billy was hungry. Dan wasn’t . . . but he was curious. Billy pulled the truck into a sandwich shop parking lot, but when he asked Dan what he could get him, Dan only shook his head.
“Sure? You got a lot ahead of you.”
“I’ll eat when this is over.”
“Well . . .”
Billy went into the Subway for a Buffalo Chicken. Dan got in touch with Abra. The wheel turned.
Ping.
When Billy came out, Dan nodded to his wrapped footlong. “Save that a couple of minutes. As long as we’re in Boulder, there’s something I want to check out.”
Five minutes later, they were on Arapahoe Street. Two blocks from the seedy little bar-and-café district, he told Billy to pull over. “Go on and chow that chicken. I won’t be long.”
Dan got out of the truck and stood on the cracked sidewalk, looking at a slumped three-story building with a sign in the window reading EFFICIENCY APTS GOOD STUDENT VALUE. The lawn was balding. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the sidewalk. He had doubted that this place would still be here, had believed that Arapahoe would now be a street of condos populated by well-to-do slackers who drank lattes from Starbucks, checked their Facebook pages half a dozen times a day, and Twittered like mad bastards. But here it was, and looking—so far as he could tell—exactly as it had back in the day.
Billy joined him, sandwich in one hand. “We’ve still got seventy-five miles ahead of us, Danno. Best we get our asses up the pass.”
“Right,” Dan said, then went on looking at the building with the peeling green paint. Once a little boy had lived here; once he had sat on the very piece of curbing where Billy Freeman now stood munching his chicken footlong. A little boy waiting for his daddy to come home from his job interview at the Overlook Hotel. He had a balsa glider, that little boy, but the wing was busted. It was okay, though. When his daddy came home, he would fix it with tape and glue. Then maybe they would fly it together. His daddy had been a scary man, and how that little boy had loved him.
Dan said, “I lived here with my mother and father before we moved up to the Overlook. Not much, is it?”
Billy shrugged. “I seen worse.”
In his wandering years, Dan had, too. Deenie’s apartment in Wilmington, for instance.
He pointed left. “There were a bunch of bars down that way. One was called the Broken Drum. Looks like urban renewal missed this side of town, so maybe it’s still there. When my father and I walked past it, he’d always stop and look in the window, and I could feel how thirsty he was to go inside. So thirsty it made me thirsty. I drank a lot of years to quench that thirst,