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CHAPTER THREE
Valen
Being back in Navesink Bank was both familiar and unfamiliar, somehow at the same time.
A part of me figured that once I was done with all my traveling around, my Kerouac days behind me, that my hometown would feel like it had always felt.
In ways, it did.
Most of the stores and restaurants were the same. But they’d been renovated, and most were run by the next generation of owners.
The people were, for the most part, the same. But their faces were different, less familiar.
I guess I thought I’d done a good job keeping in touch. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. I stayed up to date with most of the familial shit. Especially because Vi was entrenched in most of the shit, even if she was out of town as often as she was in it.
But something about not being there in person made it infinitely clear that a lot of things had fallen through the cracks, little details that, when you accumulated enough of them, made up a big picture that I didn’t get to see.
I felt a bit like an outsider, even in the club, surrounded by people I spent damn near every day of my life with for eighteen years.
The fact of the matter was, though, that time had gone on without me. My friends that had been something more like brothers and sisters had grown, had gotten their own adult lives, had forged close connections.
And I wasn’t a part of any of it anymore.
I understood, logically, that I would be. Eventually. Once I was around for a while. Once I settled in. Once everyone got comfortable with me again.
“What?” Voss rumbled at me in that familiar, gruff voice of his.
It seemed strange that Voss, who I had known for such a short period of time comparatively, seemed much more familiar, more comfortable to be around.
But, well, my family and friends, they knew me as the kid I’d been when I’d jumped town.
Voss knew me as the man I became along the way.
That knowledge made our situation different.
Closer, I guess.
Because he was the only person in the club who genuinely knew me anymore.
“What what?” I asked, looking away from the water at the pier we’d walked down to.
Voss had a fascination with the ocean. I guess because he lived most of his life in landlocked states, never having seen it. Whenever we went out to eat or even just for a ride, we tended to end up at the water.
I felt like a bit of a dick because I didn’t appreciate it the same way he did, having grown up with it, close enough that I even took it for granted at times, never visiting it for weeks or even a whole season at a time.
Even coming back after being landlocked for a while, I didn’t have the same awe that Voss did.
“Looking all introspective and shit,” he said, shrugging one of his big shoulders.
“Guess I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since getting back,” I admitted.
“‘Bout?”
“About how home doesn’t exactly feel like home,” I admitted, though I wasn’t sure he would truly understand. Voss really hadn’t everhada home.
“‘Cause it isn’t,” Voss said, tone matter-of-fact.
“What? Yes, it is.”
