Lost Along the Way

W
ITH
HEARTFELT
gratitude to:

Wendy Russo, for giving Amber and me the idea.

Amber, for being such a fantastic drinking buddy.

Alanna Coca, for helping more than I can say with the Laramie angle.

Larissa Ione and Shae Connor, for being my weather gurus.

February

A
RINGING
phone at three in the morning is never good news.

The first ring jarred me awake.

Next to me, Chase moaned and buried his head under a pillow. “What the hell? Who would call at this time of night?”

I fumbled for my cell phone, which lay on my bedside table. One glance at the screen made my adrenaline surge. I sat upright in bed. Chase, sensing my alarm, peeked at me from under his pillow.

“Who is it?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep.

That was a good question. It was a 307 area code, which meant Wyoming, but it wasn’t a number I recognized. My first thought was that it was coming from the Laramie hospital. It had to be my mom, calling to tell me my dad had suffered a heart attack. Or my dad, calling to tell me my mother had fallen on her way into the bathroom and broken her hip.

“Daniel?” Chase said, sitting up to put his hand on my shoulder. “Honey, what is it?”

The phone rang a third time. I chose to answer it rather than Chase.

“Hello?”

“Danny?” asked a male voice I didn’t recognize. “Is this Danny Whitaker?”

Nobody called me Danny anymore, but it was a moot point. Alarm made my heart pound. “Yes. Who’s this?”

“This is Landon Kushner, from Laramie. I live across the street from your parents.” He stopped, and I knew he was searching for words. “I’m afraid I have some terrible news.”

It was worse than I’d feared. My parents were dead, Landon told me. Both of them killed in a multicar crash on I-80, a bit west of Sidney, Nebraska.

“But…,” I stammered, “why were they in Nebraska?”

“They were on their way home from visiting relatives in Omaha.”

“Oh.” I felt silly for having asked such a dumb question. They’d both been born and raised in Omaha. My mother still had a sister there, and my father had two brothers. Still, it seemed unreal. I swallowed again, trying to sort out what I was feeling. Mostly, I was numb. The grief would come, I knew, but not yet. “How do you know all this?”

“I was watching their house for them while they were away. They should have been home hours ago. I had a feeling….” He stopped, and I heard him take a deep, quavering breath. “I guess the Nebraska Highway Patrol wasn’t sure who to notify, but they eventually contacted the Laramie PD, and they sent somebody to your parents’ house. I just finished talking to them.”

“Oh my God.” After years of being semi-estranged, my parents and I had finally started speaking again only a few months before. It had started with a phone call on Thanksgiving and another on Christmas. The most recent call had been on my birthday in January. Mom had asked hopefully if I’d come for the Fourth of July. “We’ll have a barbecue and then go downtown for Jubilee Days.” She’d hesitantly added, “Chase is invited too, of course.”

It was the one thing I’d been waiting for: the final acknowledgement that after nearly fifteen years together, Chase was my family as much as they were. For years it had felt like I had to choose him or them. Finally, in the last few months, it had started to look like I’d be able to have both.

But it wasn’t to be.

At least we’d spoken. At least they hadn’t died believing I hated them. Still, it was wrong. How could they be gone when we were so close to reconciling?

Chase moved to sit next to me, his hand warm and comforting on my back. He handed me a tissue. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

“Danny,” Landon said hesitantly. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

The next couple of days were a blur of phone calls—distant family members, the coroner from the Sidney hospital, Landon, and my parents’ lawyer, who informed me that my parents had purchased plots five years earlier in a cemetery in their hometown of Omaha. Although my parents had moved to Laramie when I was five and lived there for the next thirty-two years, it seemed they’d never quite considered it their home.

Strange that I still did, after all this time. And yet there was no need to go back yet, although I’d have to eventually. Their house and everything in it belonged to me.

For now there were arrangements to be made. Several stages of grief to suffer through. A memorial service to arrange in Omaha, and an entire family to deal with.

The house would have to wait.

May

I
T
WAS
not
a dark and stormy night. Somehow that would have been appropriate. It certainly would have suited my mood on the day I was fated to return to my hometown to deal with my parents’ cluttered house, but it simply wasn’t the case. Instead, the sun shone bright in the cloudless Colorado sky as if to spite me.

I wrapped up my shift at the news station, smiling as I gave the afternoon weather report for the Denver area—10 percent chance of showers in the evening, cooling to the high fifties overnight—and a forecast for the next day of mostly clear skies, 30 percent chance of afternoon storms, highs in the midseventies. All in all a typical day for late May. Then I made my way to my office with my heart full of dread.

I didn’t want to do this, but I’d already put it off too long. Landon had generously taken care of it for me since their deaths, but it was time for me to deal with it, once and for all.

Chase called at four o’clock, just as I was removing my makeup with a baby wipe. He often teased me about having to wear it, as if it was only about covering up the wrinkles that were beginning to form at the corners of my eyes, but it was more than that. The camera could be brutal.

“I thought I’d grill some burgers for dinner,” he said. “We’re out of buns, though. Can you stop on your way home?”

“You bet.” An early dinner would be perfect. We could be on the road before six.

“Get some coffee too.”

“Okay.”

“Are you leaving soon?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Good. See you in a few.”

“Love you.”

“Bye.”

The conversation took less than twenty seconds and was as routine for me as drinking a cup of coffee in the morning. Although the law prevented Chase and me from being legally married, we’d called each other “husband” for the last fifteen years.

No, I wasn’t looking forward to returning to Laramie, but at least I’d have Chase by my side. We’d been floundering lately. Not arguing, exactly. We didn’t talk enough to argue. But we’d become depressingly mechanical and complacent in our relationship. We’d become little more than roommates. I hoped a few days away from our normal routine would shake us out of it.

I stopped at Safeway on my way home as requested. Hamburger buns were easy, but as I stood debating the shelves and shelves of coffee—caramel cream or hazelnut biscotti?—I felt a tap on my elbow.

“Are you Daniel Whitaker?” a middle-aged woman in jogging clothes asked.

“Yes.”

“The Channel 9 weatherman?”

“Meteorologist,” I said, as my heart sank. I could tell by her tone this was going to hurt.

“It was supposed to rain yesterday, and it never did. I missed my afternoon run because you said it was going to rain.”

“I said 70 percent chance of afternoon showers.” And personally, I’d argued for lowering our prediction to 60 percent, but I’d been overridden by the senior meteorologist at the station.

She crossed her arms and tapped her toe. “But it didn’t.”

“It did. It just didn’t reach this far north. It was more in Castle Rock and Parker.”

“But not
here
.”

I resisted the urge to sigh, or to explain to her that “70 percent chance of showers” meant only that the predicted probability of more than a measurable amount of precipitation—defined as more than one one-hundredth of an inch—in any one point of the forecast area averaged out to 70 percent. We’d been 90 percent sure of rain in the southeastern portion of the city, but only 40 to 50 percent sure in the northwestern regions, which boiled down to a glib “70 percent chance” for the forecast.

“We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t predict tomorrow’s weather,” she grumbled as she walked away. “Maybe one of these days you’ll get it right.”

I brooded over the conversation all the way home. Everybody knows the jokes about meteorologists: Why did the weatherman get fired? Because the climate didn’t agree with him. What do you do when you get every answer wrong on your SAT? Become a weatherman. Who does everybody listen to, but nobody believe? You guessed it.

The weatherman.

As usual it wasn’t that our forecast had been inaccurate, but many viewers don’t understand basic forecast terminology. They also don’t seem to realize how difficult it could be to take massive meteorological and climatological events in an area as large and geographically varied as ours and boil them down to a three-minute forecast. If we’d only had to predict the weather for the one hundred fifty-five square miles that made up the City of Denver, it would have been easy, but our forecast area covered the entire state of Colorado—an impressive one hundred four thousand square miles—and stretched as far north as Laramie, Wyoming. Even in the greater metro area of Denver, what happened in one suburb could be vastly different than what happened in the others. It was the most frustrating part of my job. We were predicting the future, for fuck sake. Even though we got it right 90 percent of the time, people only ever talked about the 10 percent of the time when we didn’t.

I was still replaying the conversation in my head, imagining all the ways I could have contradicted the jogger, as I pulled into my driveway. Before going inside, I strolled down to the sidewalk to check the mail. My neighbor was there as well, just locking the little square door on her box.

“Evening, Daniel,” she said, without glancing up at me. She was flipping through her stack of envelopes.

“Hi, Lydia.”

“Not going to get any hail tonight, are we?” Lydia had moved to Colorado from San Diego only a few months before and seemed to live in fear of one of Colorado’s outlandish hailstorms shattering the skylight in her bedroom as she slept. Never mind that the worst hail usually stayed northeast of us, where Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska collided in an area known to weather buffs as Hail Alley. Denver had apparently seen enough golf ball-sized hail over the years to make Lydia nervous.

“Probably not.”

“Thank goodness.” She sighed and waved her stack of envelopes at me. “All junk. Every single piece.”

“Isn’t that always the way?”

Lydia was three steps away when she stopped and turned back. “I meant to tell you, Daniel. You might want to get your engine checked.”

“What?”

“I was walking Rio the other day, and I noticed there was oil in your driveway, right where you usually park.”

“Oh. Thanks for letting me know.”

Back at the house, I tried to spot the oil stain, but with my Subaru parked right on top of it, there wasn’t much to see. My car was only a few years old. None of the little alert lights had been on, and I’d had all the usual maintenance done at prescribed intervals. I didn’t know the first thing about cars, and Lydia’s warning about the oil leak worried me. Laramie was only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home in Westminster, but the last thing I needed was engine trouble along the way.

I found Chase in the kitchen, patting ground beef into patties.

“How was your day?” he asked as I set the bag from the grocery store onto the counter.

“Wonderful. I had another argument with Grant about the five-day forecast. I was reminded that my job is to read off
his
prediction rather than formulating my own.” I ticked the points off on my fingers. “The station manager suggested I lose a few pounds. The makeup girl told me the wrinkles around my eyes are now so pronounced she needs the extraheavy concealer to cover them. And I was ambushed in the coffee aisle by a fair-weather jogger.”

“All in a day’s work.” He pushed the plate of patties aside and used his wrist to nudge the faucet handle on the kitchen sink in order to wash his hands, which were coated with congealed fat from the raw hamburger. I stepped forward to squirt a drop of dish soap into his palm.

“Are you packed and ready to go?” I asked.

“Well, no. I needed to talk to you about that.” He kept his eyes on his hands as he washed. “The restaurant called today. One of the waitresses broke her collarbone in a bicycle accident—”

“Ouch.”

“—and now they’re short-staffed for the weekend.”

My heart sank. “But you asked for the time off. We already have plans.”

He turned off the water and finally faced me as he dried his hands on a kitchen towel. “I know, hun. I’m sorry. But I’m low man on the pole, and after the row I had with the manager last weekend, I can’t afford to push my luck.” He set the towel aside and stepped forward to put his hand on my arm. “It’s not like this’ll be your only trip back. I’ll request a weekend off at the beginning of July, okay?”