When I wheeled the suitcase down the hallway, they stopped.
Neither of them said goodbye.
The Buick started on the first try, as it always did. I backed out without looking at the house.
The thirty-minute drive to Pine Lodge Motel gave me space to think clearly for the first time in years. I drove past the old brick storefronts of downtown Kalispell, past the bank where I had spent thirty years of my working life, past the hardware store where I had volunteered after retiring because sitting still had never suited me. I let myself add the numbers I had been avoiding.
Tiffany’s college tuition at the private school she had said was the only place she could become herself: forty thousand dollars a year for four years. The overtime shifts I had worked for that, staying late under fluorescent lights reviewing loan applications until my hands cramped.
