The Noel Letters (The Noel Collection #4) - Richard Paul Evans Page 0,1
at JFK, but she had sat knitting so quietly throughout the flight I’d forgotten she was even there. Or maybe I’d just been too preoccupied winding my way through the labyrinth of my thoughts. At any rate, her question vexed me. I wasn’t sure where home was anymore. I wasn’t even sure if I knew what the word meant.
“I was born there,” I said softly. “But I haven’t been back for sixteen years.”
“Goodness, that’s a long time to be away. What brings you back now?”
“I’m going to see my father.”
Her smile broadened. “I’ve always loved a homecoming. After all that time, you must be so excited to see him.”
“He’s dying,” I said.
Her expression fell. “I’m sorry, dear. God bless you.”
“Thank you.” I looked back out the window at the snow-covered world below. The crystalline blanket reflected the light of the winter moon in a dull cobalt blue. The Wasatch Range was taller than I remembered, rising in a jagged ridge running in a near-perfect line north to south of the valley like a great snow wall. The buildings below looked small and flat and well-spaced, nothing like New York, where every street was a slot canyon and every building a mountain.
Home. Homeward bound. One of my colleagues at the publishing house called me a hobo, which she said was a contraction of “homeward bound.” Of course, I looked it up. Maybe. Or it might be a contraction of “homeless boy,” or even a derivative of Hoboken, New Jersey. It’s another one of those words that slipped into the back row of our cultural lexicon without a ticket.
My anxiety rose with each passing minute. I hadn’t even taken the book I’d brought with me out of my carry-on, which pretty much shows the state I was in. After all this time, I had no idea what I would say to my father. Actually, I was more concerned about what he would say to me. Maybe it would be a weeklong shame festival with a dying man. Why was I doing this? I think if I could have turned the plane around I probably would.
The previous holiday, a colleague told me she was going home for Thanksgiving for the first time in five years. She had hopes for reconciliation with her mother. Her anticipated homecoming lasted less than an hour. She likened the experience to an emotional ambush. Seven hours later she was back in New York eating a Banquet turkey potpie for Thanksgiving. The difference between her experience and mine is that I had no such expectations. My father was dying. The most I could hope for was to put the past in a box and bury it. Literally as well as figuratively.
When my father was first diagnosed with cancer, the doctor had given him six months to live, which he hadn’t told me until the last two weeks when, I guess, he finally accepted that he was engaged in a losing battle. That’s when he asked to see me one last time. There are things that need to be said. Those words scared me most of all.
He had invited me to stay at his house, my childhood home, adding that my room was exactly the same as I’d left it almost two decades ago. I had resisted the invitation, it was my MO, but he was anticipating my rejection. “Noel,” he said softly. “It’s our last chance.”
What could I say to that? Frankly, I didn’t need the expense of a hotel. New York is expensive and book editors aren’t exactly overpaid. He had also offered to pay for my flight and the use of his car, which he obviously wouldn’t be using while I was there. From the sound of things, probably never again.
I consoled myself that it would only be a week. I could stand anything for a week.
My father had arranged for Wendy, the manager of his bookstore, to pick me up from the airport. I had met her, but it had been a while. We were roughly the same age, though she always seemed like a much older soul to me. She’d started working part-time at the bookstore just a few months before I left, and had worked her way up to manager. I remembered that she was pretty, in a different sort of way. She had the slight, lanky figure of a Lladró statuette, with bright carrot-colored hair and a matching complexion. The thing I remembered most about her was that she worshipped my father. Even