Chapter 8 - A Cold House in Anacortes
The drive north on Interstate 5 was gray and steady.
The rain had settled into that typical Puget Sound mist that hangs between the fir trees and the asphalt like wet smoke. Caleb drove an eight-year-old Subaru Outback he had bought from Nathan Ross’s brother at ten o’clock that morning for seven thousand dollars cash. It smelled of wet dog and cedar shavings, its heater made a whistling rattle on the medium setting, and the steering wheel had a slight pull to the left that required him to keep both hands on the rim.
He hadn't felt this awake in ten years.
In the back seat, Leo had his face pressed against the cold glass, watching the mile markers tick past with rhythmic satisfaction. Nora was asleep again, her small hand curled around Caleb’s old wool scarf, which he had folded into a pillow for her head. Julian sat behind the passenger seat, his fingers methodically testing the spring tension of the middle seatbelt buckle.
Evelyn sat beside Caleb in the front, her hands resting quietly in her lap.
She hadn't spoken since they cleared the Skagit River bridge. She was watching the road, her face turned three-quarters toward the window, her breath making tiny round patches of fog on the glass that vanished every three seconds.
“You didn't have to give up the company,” she said finally. Her voice was barely louder than the whistle of the dashboard heater.
“Yes, I did,” Caleb said.
“They would have settled, Caleb. Your mother was terrified. You could have forced her out and kept the title.”
Caleb shifted down as the highway curved toward the March Point oil refineries, the giant metal towers rising out of the flats like iron cathedrals against the gray sky.
“If I kept the company, I would have kept the schedule,” he said. “I would have been in Singapore next week. I would have been in Washington the week after that. I would have had three phones on the breakfast table, and every time Julian asked me why the toaster worked, I would have told him I had a conference call with Munich in five minutes.”
He glanced at her.
“I watched my father do that until his brain gave out on an airplane over Denver,” Caleb said. “He spent twenty years making sure nobody in Seattle thought he was still an orchard boy from Yakima, and when he died in that hospital room, the only people who came to the private service were three accountants and a guy who wanted to buy his country club membership.”
Evelyn looked down at her fingers. She turned the small silver ring on her middle finger—the one she had bought for twelve dollars at the street fair when they were twenty-four.
“It’s not going to be easy, Caleb,” she said. “The kids don't know you. They know the idea of you, but they don't know what it’s like to have someone in the house who isn't me. Leo screams when people touch his notebooks without asking. Julian wakes up at four in the morning because he thinks the water heater is leaking. And Nora... Nora will test you until you want to put your head through a wall just to see if you’ll leave like everyone else does.”
Caleb slowed the car as they hit the commercial strip of Anacortes—the marine supply stores, the drive-through coffee stands with their neon signs glowing pink in the damp noon light, the boat yards with their white hulls wrapped in shrink-wrap for the winter.
“I’m an engineer, Evelyn,” he said softly. “I don't mind fixing things that take a long time.”
She pointed toward a side street that curved down toward the Guemes Channel. “Turn left at the red mailbox. The gravel driveway between the two cedars.”
The house was small.
It was a single-story craftsman from the 1940s, covered in weathered cedar shakes that had turned dark gray from seventy years of salt air. The front porch had a visible sag on the left side where a cedar post had rotted into the soil, and the roof had three mismatched patches of green composition shingle over the kitchen wing.
In the yard, an old galvanized tub was full of rainwater, and two small red bicycles with training wheels lay on their sides in the grass.
Caleb put the car in park and turned off the engine.
The silence that filled the vehicle was immense.
Julian unbuckled his seatbelt with a sharp snap. He looked out the window at the front door, then at Caleb’s shoulder.
“We have tomato soup,” the boy said. “From the can with the red label.”
Caleb turned in his seat. He looked at Julian’s gray-green eyes—his own eyes, looking back at him from five years in the past.
“Do you have crackers?” Caleb asked.
Julian nodded once, very gravely. “The ones with the salt on top. But you have to crush them before you open the plastic, or the crumbs get in the rug and Mama makes you use the dustpan.”
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“I’m very good with a dustpan,” Caleb said.
Julian looked at him for three seconds, considering the data, then opened the rear door and hopped out into the wet gravel, his boots crunching briskly as he ran toward the porch to check if the outside light was still working.
