Denver Cancelled

I want to start with the flight, because the flight is the whole thing.

Rachel knew my itinerary. She had asked for it twice — once at the start of the month and once on the Monday, casually, over the phone, the way you ask about weather. Back Sunday, I had said. Late Sunday. Denver connection.

She had three hours of margin on the Saturday evening and she used all of them.

The Denver leg went off the board at half past one in the afternoon. The agent offered me Monday morning. I stood in that terminal doing the arithmetic — eleven hours by road, arrive around nine — and something in me that I still cannot properly account for said drive.

I have thought about that a great deal since. I do not believe in premonitions. I believe I had been ignoring nineteen phone calls' worth of information for a year and that some part of me had finally finished adding it up without my permission.

I stopped once for fuel and a coffee I didn't drink.

I came up Ridgeway a little after twenty past eight and the first thing I noticed was that the front light was off.

Tom's house always has the front light on. He is his mother's son that way. The porch light was off and the living room was blue with television.

I sat in the car for maybe ten seconds looking at that dark porch.

Then I went up the path and let myself in with my own key.