Page 18 of Not a Word

“Like home?” he asked, smiling. He closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating, then said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“Robert Frost,” I said.

Holden pointed, made the sound of game show buzzer, and said, “We have a Final Jeopardy winner, ladies and gentlemen. You always were a literate fucker.”

“I was asking seriously, about you getting help. If you have to go back, will they take you? Is there a referral process or anything? Or could you go in there today?”

“It was just one line,” he said, looking down at the coffee table where the powder had been. “Just some shit I had left over from a long time ago. Saving it for a rainy day. You don’t have to make a federal case out of it.”

“I thought you were celebrating. But now today’s a rainy day?”

“Figure of speech,” he said, waving his hand again.

“Thing is, I’ve got some bad news that might set you back.”

Holden suddenly looked very serious. “And what might that be?”

We both heard a car pull up out front and come to a stop. Holden rose from the couch and peered over my shoulder through the grime-covered living room window.

“Oh shit,” he said.

He embarked on a more thorough brushing off of the coffee table, grabbed something in a small plastic bag, and ran for the bathroom, presumably to flush it away.

I went to the window and saw what had him concerned. A Yorkton Hill Police cruiser had turned in toward the curb, blocking my car. An officer I recognized was checking it out, standing out back of it and reading the license plate.

“I’ve got a feeling he’s not here for you,” I said.

Seven

Gage didn’t want to go home.

He didn’t want his mom or dad trying to comfort him. He could guess the kinds of things they’d say.

We’re here for you.

Let it out.

It’s okay to cry.

We know how much your grandfather meant to you.

He didn’t want to hear it. They were always trying to make things better, or telling you that all the shit in your life wasn’t as big a deal as you thought it was, that they knew high school was tough, but this too shall pass. Like, if people were texting crap about you, you were supposed to just let that go, that there’d always be people who made themselves feel better by putting other people down. How in the long run, this stuff didn’t matter. Gage thinking, he should try that on his dad. Sure, WorldWide canned you, but hey, walk it off, you’ll find another newswriting gig any day now. Yeah, right, they tried to dismiss his concerns, but flunk a test, well, that was a whole different thing. Fail a course, you’ll have to go to summer school, you’ll never get accepted into a university and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get into a community college, but more likely you’ll be stocking shelves at Walmart your entire miserable life.

Not that he hated his parents or anything. They were okay. It was just that there were things he couldn’t talk about with them. But he could always talk about stuff with his grandfather. Brent Chartwell was pretty cool for an old guy. He’d seen it all, done it all, and it wasn’t like he’d rat Gage out if he told him stuff he couldn’t bring himself to tell his parents.

“We all make mistakes,” his grandfather would say. “God knows I’ve made plenty.”

While his grandfather didn’t go into details, Gage had an inkling of what some of those mistakes were. There was his uncle Holden, of course, who was a constant concern, and his grandfather had given hints that he felt some responsibility there.

But Gage liked his uncle Holden. When he wasn’t going through one of his rough patches, spending time at that Sharnwood place getting his head screwed back on straight, he was cool to hang out with, often without his parents’ knowledge. Watching movies, playing video games, but also really talking about things. How corporate self-interest controlled the flow of information. How critical thinking was a thing of the past, and if you repeated a lie often enough, people believed it. When he wasn’t high, Holden was a thinker, and in that way, a role model for Gage.

He also told Gage not to make the same mistakes he’d made. If Gage asked to take one small drag off a joint, Holden would say no and give him shit for asking.

Drugs were kind of a family cross to bear. Gage knew his grandfather had worked in Big Pharma at one time, and it was a period he’d not been proud of. Lots of people got hooked on some pain pill and a whole lot of them died. His grandfather’d actually talked to him about it a few times, almost like confessing. One of his biggest mistakes, he’d said, working for that company. And although he never said it outright, Gage got the idea one of his others might have been marrying his grandmother.

Gage’s mother sometimes referred to Catherine Chartwell as a “cold fish.” Gage thought that was a nice way of calling someone a bitch, and his grandmother could be one on occasion. Bit of a control freak. Wanting everything just so. He got on okay with her, but when he went over to their house it was his grandfather he wanted to hang with.

Two years ago, when Gage was twelve, a couple of his dumbass friends dared him to steal some shit from a 7-Eleven. They’d create a distraction—pretend to get into a heated argument over some girl while over by the cold drinks aisle—and give Gage the opportunity to walk out with a couple of bags of Doritos under his jacket. He didn’t want to do it, but when they accused him of being a pussy, he caved. But the shopkeeper was no dummy. He’d seen kids run games like this before and was wise to them, and he grabbed Gage by the arm as he was walking out the door.