them open. Wide-eyed, she looked like a girl. A pretty young girl. She looked like her niece, Starlyn.
“Good morning!” she said. Her gaze swept the room again and came once more to rest on the counter. “Do I see French toast?” She pointed excitedly. “Did you make that? Oh, what a peach!”
He had just set her breakfast in front of her when they heard a noise overhead.
“DaDa’s up,” Tracy said cheerfully. But Cole, familiar with PW’s condition the morning after he’d drunk too much, felt a tremor of anxiety. He thought of the people waiting at the church.
He was glad he wasn’t being forced to make conversation. With a hunger to match her thirst, Tracy was attacking her plate. (Though even in her befuddled state, she had not forgotten to give thanks.)
PW, on the other hand, would surely not want to eat first thing this morning. What he’d want was a whole lot of coffee.
As he was making the coffee, Cole started composing in his head another message to his aunt.
And later that morning, when he was alone—when Tracy was upstairs taking a bath and PW had dragged himself and his hammering head off to the church—Cole sat down to write Addy.
I can’t explain everything now, it’s too complicated. But things have gotten way crazy here and sadly I can’t come visit.
Now that the sun was high the room was becoming stifling. The air reeked of maple syrup and bacon. Cole took a sip of coffee. He had decided to start drinking coffee just that morning. Before, he’d never liked the taste. Honestly, he still didn’t like the taste, but everyone knew coffee was supposed to help you think. And he had so much thinking to do.
What I mean is I can’t leave Salvation City right this minute. There’s too much I have to take care of. I’ll explain next time we talk. But one other thing. Do you think I could use some of that money you were telling me about now? I know it’s supposed to be for college, but I want to get my own computer.
Yet one more decision he was going to have to explain to PW.
When he had sent his message to Addy, he went out and got on his bicycle. He was headed for the church, but once he started riding he decided to take the long way around, past the old railroad station, making a loop through downtown. It was hot but he wanted to be out for a while, and bike riding always soothed him.
After a mile the sweat poured down his face and gnats swarmed him. There was no coolness in the shade of the large trees under which he passed, just a damper kind of heat. Only the faintest blue showed in the hazy sky. A dog on someone’s porch began barking when it saw him, the noise like firecrackers going off in the calm street.
Downtown was mostly dead. He passed Hix’s Hardware (“Not today, brother, I got work to do”). He passed the drugstore, the used furniture store, the barber shop, the yarn store, the pizzeria, and the gun shop. He made a right at the post office and rode past the bank and the thrift shop, in front of which a woman had just placed a sign: “Brand New Used Maternity Clothes.” Beyond the thrift shop was a diner that had closed sometime before Cole moved to town. It had closed suddenly, and if you looked in the window you could see the tables still set for lunch, the dishes slowly filling up with dust. The car dealership at the end of the street had also gone out of business. A parallel Cole wheeled along in the glass.
The church was a plain beige building with brown roof and trim, the kind of place you’d expect to go for some mundane but useful thing, like lumber or tools or house paint. Cole knew it had once been an American Legion Post, and long before that, about a hundred years before, a meeting-house had stood on this site, a white clapboard building that had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan after a Quaker pastor gave shelter to a black man—a hobo from Kentucky—accused of pocketing a nickel a white farmer had dropped on his way to town.
When he rode up to the church, Cole saw that no one was there. The parking lot was empty except for a few starlings pecking at the tufts of grass