His jaw works.
“How old are you?” I ask, desperate to get the spotlight off me.
“I’ll be forty this summer. Old enough to be your father.”
“Only if you got started real young.”
“Only about as young as you did.”
I gasp, and he leans back, popping his door open and stepping onto the curb. He reaches past me and takes a pistol and holster from the middle compartment. There’s no response in me. I’m getting tired of going back and forth.
I watch as he stands at the edge of the road and fastens the holster around his upper thigh, buckling it to his belt. Then, he reaches out like he’s going to slam the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
He looks at me, eyes blank in the overhead lights. “Gonna go urinate in the ditch,” he says, and does slam the door.
My blood pressure is through the roof. I cross my arms over my chest and don’t move a muscle while he’s gone. My God, if he isn’t the strongest concentrate of Appalachian male I’ve ever met.
I’ve never known a man from the mountains who didn’t have sass coming out of his damn ears. Jensen has it in spades.
The door opens. He gets in, and starts up the engine. We’re quiet as he rolls back on the highway. It’s quiet—after our burst of conversation. We both have some thinking to do.
The road we’re on cuts through the mountains. They get thicker and taller as we go. Then, I think from the flashes I can see in the headlights, the flora changes. It’s more familiar, tangled vines coating the ditches.
My heart picks up. I stretch my neck, trying to see into the dark.
“Did we cross the border?” I whisper.
“Yeah.” That single word is so tense.
Iturn around, and his forearm is like iron, knuckles pale on the wheel.
“We’re in Pike County?” I press.
He shakes his head. “Harlan.”
Something settles over me that I can’t name—a painful longing, a hollow in my heart. He’s struggling with something too. I leave him be, keeping quiet until he pulls off on the side of the road.
We’re outside a strip motel, a neon sign advertising hourly booking. He gets out, not bothering to hide the gun on his thigh. As we cross the parking lot, I see his eyes like searchlights, just roaming. I keep close.
There’s a woman at the desk, young, with dyed black hair piled on her head, a tattoo of a butterfly on the side of her neck. She looks us over, chatting about the weather, and pops her gum. Jensen is tighter than a bow as he pays in cash and takes the key.
He leads the way to a room a few doors down. We go inside, and I turn on the single lamp by the bed. He locks the door. Everything feels different than I remember, like somebody went through my house while I was gone and rearranged everything. Or maybe, I just grew up.
I turn to face him. “You okay?” I whisper.
His tanned skin is dewy with sweat. I can make out the pulse between his collarbones where his shirt is soaked.
“I never wanted to come home again,” he rasps.
There’s no room now for the snappy replies we’ve been trading all day. He’s shaken to his core, eyes haunted.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock over the bed moves. There’s a watercolor painting of Jesus on the face, looking down on us, one palm up, the kind that comes a dime a dozen at thrift shops. Jensen looks at the window, paisley curtains stiff with starch, and up at the clock, then back to me.
