Lancaster, only then it didn’t stop, water sluicing across the windshield faster than his shitty wipers could take care of it. Colby gritted his teeth and kept driving, shoulders hunched and jaw clenched hard enough to ache. He hated weather like this; it was exactly how it had been the night his dad—
Stop it.
He pulled over at a service station outside Allentown to piss and buy a Snickers and use the rest of the cash in his wallet to fill his gas tank, which he hoped was enough to get him home. The clerk was a pale blond girl with a small, painful-looking mountain range of acne across her jaw. “Have a good night,” she said, picking up the battered sci-fi novel she’d been reading. Colby thought this would be the loneliest job in the world.
By the time he got back on the highway, it was really pouring, his toes curling up inside his uncomfortable shoes like he could keep better traction on the road that way. The night was black as the inside of a grave. He turned the radio down so he could concentrate and flicked on his high beams . . .
Just in time to see the deer darting out into the middle of the road.
Colby swerved at the very last second, the car fishtailing all over the empty highway before skidding to a stop three inches from the guardrail. The deer scampered off into the woods. For a second, Colby just sat there, fingers white-knuckled around the steering wheel and the iron tang of his own heart in his mouth.
Then, before he knew exactly what he was doing, he wrenched off his seat belt and got out of the car.
The rain was apocalyptic. Colby’s hair plastered against his forehead; his shirt soaked through right away like a second skin. The roar of it was incessant, deafening, just like it had been that afternoon last year when—
Cut it out, he ordered himself, but he already knew it was useless. He dropped his shoulders and let the memory come.
He’d been dicking around with Micah outside the office park, the two of them playing chicken with the nearing rolls of thunder; it was only once the sky had finally opened that they’d dashed into their cars and called it a day. Colby thought about that a lot, though he knew it was probably useless—that maybe if he’d been home a little earlier, if they’d just microwaved some mozzarella sticks and watched fucking Beaches on cable or whatever—
Anyway.
When he got home his dad’s car was in the driveway instead of in the garage, where it usually was. Colby let himself in through the back just like always, found Tris losing her mind at the door. “Buddy, if you gotta go, you gotta go,” Colby scolded mildly, nudging the dog out into the sodden yard and getting himself a glass of orange juice. Tris plastered her furry body against the slider and howled until Colby let her inside again. “What’s up with the dog?” he called into the living room; when his dad didn’t answer, he raised his eyebrows at Tris. “Where’s Dad?”
The TV was dark in the empty living room, and the shower wasn’t running. He wasn’t taking a nap in his bedroom, which he’d been doing more lately, though all of them seemed to have agreed to act like they didn’t notice. Colby finished his orange juice, put his empty glass in the dishwasher.
That was when he opened the door to the garage.
Once, when Colby was in middle school, Tris had disemboweled a giant possum and brought it into the house as a present, and his mom had walked right past it on the living room floor. “I honestly didn’t see it,” she insisted later, even though everyone kept saying she must have. “I think my brain just protected me.”
Which was to say: for a long fucking time, maybe a full minute, all Colby registered in the dank, mildew-smelling garage was the sound of the dog barking her head off and the single shoe that had fallen onto the concrete floor.
Now he wiped his face even though it was useless. He never let himself think about that night, and this was exactly why. He stood there for another long moment, the rain pooling in his ridiculous dress shoes as he remembered the rest of it: how he’d tripped over himself and scraped the palms of his hands in his scramble to find something to cut his dad down with,