The gas station just east of Devil’s Lake sells leashes, I pick out a pink one, three sticks of beef jerky and another six bottles of water. I’ve been pouring water into the drink holder in the center console and when he’s ready Hon will bend down and take a drink. I’ve been too hesitant to put the leash on him yet, he’s never shown a need for one. Instead I’ve started to tell him stories. I told him about why we are going, to show Meredith that you exist. I tell him the stories about us growing up, how I was eight and she was six and that we did a lot of things together. She was always into animals more than I was, even wanted to be a vet. I never knew what I wanted to do. I ate two of the beef jerky sticks, quickly, and made myself a little sick, Hon ate his in a big gulp like a duck and seemed to be unbothered by it. I told him about how after our grandmother died that I went out to the bridge by Calcutta road, where the moss grew over everything because of the drainage pond for the dairy plant a road over and drank cheap vodka in hearty slugs with friends that I only drank with. It became night early and I dropped the windows of the car and spoke over the wind coming in, Hon watched me the whole time, like he was afraid he would miss something. I told him that Meredith went into High School the head of her class and stayed there, I did all right, I didn’t just drink by the time she made it up there. I was a senior and she was a freshman, and instead of walking home together I gave her money for the corner store and walked to the bush line behind my friend, who really was my friend, not just a drinking friend, Matt Steele’s, and we would smoke weed out of anything we could find, it was usually fruits, you could hollow out the center of an apple with a pair of thin scissors and a pencil to make a choke and a mouth piece, your breath would come out smelling like burnt cider. I did a lot of other things too, when two years after her death our grandfather killed himself, with a hunting rifle. Our father found him, and he wasn’t all right for a while. Hon had to get let out every forty-five minutes or so because he would claw at the door handle and if I didn’t stop he would have just gotten the door to pop, the Cavalier had cheap locks and they had stopped working on the passenger side. He would go out, to wherever we were, and stand a few feet down the slope, possibly staring up a tree or down a hole, never barking, only opening his mouth. And after a moment he would relieve himself or turn around and come back to the car, each time as I shut the door I would catch different sized jewels moving in the dark, the eye glints of animals watching us roll away. I told Hon about how I would take road trips with Matt Steele to as far away New Orleans, where his uncle had a tattoo parlor, and we’d stay up the whole trips and piss into bottles and stare out into the Mississippi with uppers and psychedelics mixed in our veins. I dropped out of my last half of my senior year because I was out of the state for most of it. Meredith was still doing well, still got good grades. I gave her a call from a pay phone in east Tennessee when we thought we had a good place to stay, we didn’t the shack we were going to rent and work out of was burned down by the same friend who told us we could stay there. I was coming down off a lot of things, and had just enough to call back home. I didn’t expect Meredith to pick up. The conversation went something like this:
“Hey,” I think this was the first time I ever did this, speak before they did, probably because everything was jitters inside of me. “Hello?”
There was silence on the line for a little while.
“Del?” the voice sounded like my mother’s, but it didn’t crackle with menthol wear. “Where are you?”
“Outside of Knoxville. I think. Meredith?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you the only one there?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is everybody?”
“Working.”
Another silence.
“You coming home?” She asked.
A few days short of two weeks and we were back in Illinois. I stayed for a three days at Matt’s place, before deciding to head back to the house. I sat in the front porch for a while, then tried the back door that led into the garage, and it was open, something that had stayed the same. I had a sleeping bag with me and rolled it out in there, there were no cars, only a few storage racks for things and tools our parents didn’t use all that often. I slept on the floor until Meredith woke me up. She was a junior now, just a few weeks into the semester. I showed her tattoos I had gotten and we waited for our parents to come back.
When day broke in front of us we were a few miles out still, but close. For the first time I put the leash on Hon and we walked into a diner together. I asked if we could eat together, that the dog was well trained, and the waitress didn’t mind. I told her that I’d tip well and she said louder that she didn’t mind. I ordered for both of us and we sat on the cold vinyl seats as the sun came up and up in the windows. I finished my story.
“After that I worked for a long time, there was a shipping warehouse in our town that allowed me to work double shifts for a little while, until I could apply to get back to high school and finished everything up. The time went by quicker than you’d think. My parents were the same, seemed to be happy to have me back. Meredith was happy too, but different, she didn’t talk as much, kept a lot of time to herself. She started dating Sang Ho the week I finished high school. And everything was okay for a little bit. But it never stays that way Hon. “
The waitress brought us food, eggs and bacon for me and eggs and bacon for Hon.
“I mean, what are big brothers for if not for leaving when they’re most needed?” Hon waited for me to eat to start himself and ate slower and finished after I did.
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