He’d wanted to fly even before he wanted to leave.
Along the river. Through the cemetery on the hill, where he’d found his mother’s headstone his first day out. He stood in front of it, wondering what the point of the stone was. His mother survived in his head, and she would die when nobody remembered her. This undulating patch of land covered in granite—who was it for, when nobody alive knew what most of these people had looked like or the sound of their voices?
You couldn’t hold on to the people you loved by planting slabs of rock in the earth. They died. Everyone died. It was the single unshakable fact of the human condition, and yet nobody ever seemed to get it. People thought love was a foundation they could build their lives on. When you did that, and you lost your foundation, the whole house of cards collapsed.
Carson had seen it happen. That summer, when he was twenty-one years old, and his mother spent hour after hour hooked up to a dialysis machine that couldn’t keep her going anymore, he’d become resigned to losing her, and his father had gone slack and helpless with despair.
Julie’s kidney gave Martin the reprieve he’d prayed for, but it couldn’t give him forever. There was no forever. All you got was sixty or eighty or a hundred years, and you had to do something with them. You had to change the world, push it in the right direction as far as you could manage.
He’d tried to explain it to his mother once, but she’d only looked sorry for him, which he couldn’t understand.
Carson walked.
They were long, cold walks, but he dressed for them. Two towns over, they made long underwear at the Duofold factory, and he’d taken to wearing the waffle-weave shirts under flannel. Beneath his jeans, a second layer kept his ass from freezing off. Thick wool socks and lined gloves. A watchman’s cap. His father’s wool coat. The uniform of the Upstate workingman.
He liked looking at the steep rooflines most of the houses had, thinking about how people’s dwellings adapted to their environments. He studied his hometown like the outsider he was. A man who’d built things all over the world—utilitarian structures for the army when he was in the engineering corps, grander buildings for the Foreign Service that echoed the architecture of the nations where they were built.
A man who spoke four languages fluently and could get by in eight or nine but couldn’t talk to his own father.
A man who felt his feet getting mired a little deeper every hour he spent in Julie Long’s house.
He’d finished buffing the ceiling while she was out getting groceries, then caught himself waiting for her to get home so he could show her how it looked, anticipating the pleasure on her face as if it would be his own.
Not what he was supposed to be doing. He kicked himself out of the house to go drink coffee and eat a cinnamon roll at the diner.
Now he walked, and as his boots crunched over the frozen gravel path of the cemetery, he imagined the mud falling off them. The trap opening. The chains dropping away.
Nothing kept him here. Just his conscience, and he could be a remorseless bastard if he had to.
He ended up at the shoe factory on the river, as he often did. A sprawling, monstrous beast constructed of weathered limestone blocks, it had humble origins as a tannery. The first Potter in Potter Falls had turned it into a felt mill, an enterprise that required wool lint and a lot of water. This was back in the era when everybody who aspired to genteel status owned a piano with insides full of felt. Eventually, a Potter descendant moved into felt slippers, then ladies’ shoes, sold under the Emery Potter brand. The town grew up with the enterprise, and the factory became a testament to the booming business.
Until people stopped wearing felt slippers. The information age arrived and sucked all the jobs and productivity out of this part of the world. If the shoe factory stood testament to anything now, it was Potter Falls’s decline.
Carson couldn’t stop looking at it. Wall after wall of broken, darkened windows. The high ceilings. The way it perched over the river, looming if you approached from the pebbled banks, but from the road above it seemed to float over the water.
Car keys jingled, and he turned his head. Leo Potter leaned against a black Mercedes, his camel-hair coat and wingtips so incongruous that Carson could have recognized him even if his face were unfamiliar.
Which it was, actually. Leo had shifted and softened with age, his sharp chin and cheekbones lost in a fuller, more florid countenance that resembled his father’s.
The crown prince of Potter Falls had become its ruler.
“Want to look inside?” he asked. “I’ve got a key.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“You’ve been looking at it all week.” Leo glanced down the road toward his office building. “I can see from my window.”
Carson turned away, unsure how to respond. The wind cut across his cheek, across his exposed need and the longing for something he couldn’t name that dogged him every time he made the mistake of coming back to this town.
He stuffed down the urge to snap at Leo, even though Leo was doing this all wrong. You weren’t supposed to walk up to the enemy without even saying hello and offer him something he craved. It wasn’t seemly.
They were no longer friends, and Carson didn’t want anything Leo had to offer him. But he wanted inside that factory.
?
??Yes,” he said.
And Leo gave him the key. Simple as that.