October 16, 2026
Friday. The coffees were in the window when I came down. Ash looked at them, looked at me, said nothing, which is where we have landed on that. Just because the machine itself might have ulterior motives doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy good coffee.
Ash turned abruptly on the counter. “Do you really not remember what Joseph mentioned yesterday?”
The cup stopped close enough to my face where I could distinguish between the coffee and chocolate smells.
“Damn.”
Elara chose that moment to pick hers up off the counter and take a huge gulp before heading to the front door.
“Pour it out.”
I sighed, he was right. And the last thing I wanted heading into this weekend was knowing that I had given Joseph incentive to create a new torture program that included dietary “suggestions.”
Before the last drop left the cup for destinations unknown down the drain, the KafoMaster lightly chimed. The display screen said “Wake-up Refresher, Boss style.”
Ash looked at me wide-eyed. “Go ahead, drink what the machine tells you to.”
“You’re just not going to be happy with this one way or the other are you.”
I tentatively tapped the screen to pull up what the drink was.
“It’s pinkish-orange…what more do you need to know.” Ash was getting impatient.
Tart cherries, mango, whey protein, creatine, coconut water, lime and mint.
“We don’t like mango.”
I took a sip, then another.
“I think I can say we like this mango.” I said to Ash who was squinting through a frown at me.
Just then Elara beeped the horn twice on her truck. A brief moment later I had my refresher, gym bag and an embarrassed smile on my face as I slid behind the wheel of my car. Shoneah was looking out the side window from Elara’s truck, gesturing to a non-existent watch on her wrist.
Leg day at the gym, which I both respect and dread, the way you respect and dread an honest accountant. Legs do not let you lie. Squats first, down to depth, nothing skipped at the bottom where the skipping is tempting. Then the leg press for your ego. Romanian deadlifts for the hamstrings, slow, feeling for the stretch and not the ego. Walking lunges down the turf and back, which is the part that tells me the truth about how old I am. Calf raises to finish.
“You are going to be sitting in a car for five hours,” Ash observed, while I racked the bar. “On the legs you just destroyed.”
“I know.”
“I am only saying that the timing is a choice.”
We showered, got Elara another coffee and headed out for our normal morning good-bye.
“See you about five?” she asked, climbing into her truck.
“Sounds good. Pick up your truck on Sunday?”
“That works, or you can drop me off Monday morning.”
“Ok babe. Have a great day.” Ash waved to Shoneah as they pulled out. He turned on my shoulder facing the building. “Let’s go get another of those mango drink things.”
I didn’t argue.
I had Brenda first thing, the standing check-in, and it was a good one. We talked about the designer. Rowan Ellis drew the floors and has been two weeks out, and the drawings came in, and they are better than what I had in my head, which is the whole reason you hire the person instead of drawing it yourself on a napkin. The fourth floor with the elevator doors opening on warm light. The fifth with the group rooms and the quiet corner. Brenda had notes, all of them sharper than mine. She is going to get Ellis and the contractor in the same room next week so the drawing and the building stop being two different conversations.
“Go,” she said, at the end, before I could make the meeting longer than it needed to be. “Call me if you need anything this weekend.” She gave me a quick hug while we waited for the elevator. “Give my best to your mom.”
The rest of the day was a work day with one eye on the clock, the way the day before a trip always is. I did what was in front of me. I signed what needed signing. And at a little after five Elara came through my door, Aiolos had dropped her at the Center so we could leave straight from there. “Aiolos mentioned that if we don’t have plans next weekend, we could do a football day on Sunday.”
“Yes” Ash said without hesitation. “Maybe he’ll do steak again.”
“Relax. Lets get the drive done first.”
We loaded the car in the last of the light and pointed it at New Jersey.
The drive is the real thing about these trips. Five hours in a car is five hours where there is nowhere else to be and nothing to do with your hands, and that is when the things that do not come out at a kitchen table come out. We did the first hour on nothing. The radio, the road, her hand on my knee. And then somewhere past the second toll I started talking about my father, and she let me, the way she lets me, which is to say completely.
I talk about him more every year. For a long time I could not. Now I want to, which I think is the healing nobody tells you about, that one day the person stops being a wound you protect and starts being a story you are allowed to tell.
“He was Army,” I said. “Vietnam. He did not talk about it, not to me, not really. My whole childhood it was this room in the house nobody went into. You knew it was there. You knew not to open the door.”
“What did he carry,” Elara said. Not what did he do. What did he carry. She knew which question it was.
“Everything,” I said. “He came back and he looked fine, at least in pictures. That was the thing that fooled everybody, including him. All his arms and legs, a job, followed by a wife and kids. He could not sleep. My whole life, that man did not sleep. My mother used to come down at four in the morning and he would be laying on the living room floor, barely asleep, the television showing offline static.
I had to stop a second on that one. It is close, that image. It has always been close.
“I did not understand, when I was a boy, what I was looking at when I came down for water and saw my father laying there.”
“Agent Orange?” she asked, quietly, because she knows that part.
“Agent Orange,” I said. “The war got him twice. Once while he was there, in his head, the part that never came home. And once on a slow timer, in his body, years later, the part they sprayed on the whole country and told everybody it was fine. He survived the actual war. What he did not survive was being a man it had happened to, for forty more years, with nobody in his generation allowed to say a word about it. They came home to a country that wanted them to just be fine. So he was fine. He was fine right up until he wasn’t, and by then it was too late to be anything else.”
Elara did not fill the quiet. She did not reach for the comforting thing or the fixing thing. She just put her hand back on my knee and left it, and let the road go by, and let my father be a hard true thing in the car with us for a while, which is the only honest way to carry him.
“I’m glad you tell me,” she said, eventually.
That got me, a little. I let it. You are allowed, in a dark car, with the right person, hours from a grave.
We stopped in Philadelphia for dinner. Not the sandwiches this time, we did those on the last trip. A small Italian place in the south of the city that Winter found for me years ago, the kind with the tables close together and the bread that comes without asking and the waiter who very well might have been from the old country. We split a plate of clams casino and then gnocchi, and it was exactly what you want halfway through a drive like that, warm and plain and a little too much.
I called Winter from the car after dinner.
“We’re leaving Philly,” I said. “About two and a half hours out.”
“You’re good?” My sister does not ask how the drive is. She asks the real one, in two words, the way we do.
“I’m good.”
“Ok. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m coming by in the morning before the cemetery.”
“I’ll text you when we get up to moms.”
We got there a little before ten. The porch light was on, the way it is always on. My mother leaves it on for a husband nine years gone and for children grown and scattered. A lit porch is how her house says the door is open, even when nobody is coming. We came up the walk and I knocked the old knock, the one from being seventeen. I heard her come. The door opened.
She looked at me. For a second there was the blank, the half-second of searching that is part of our life now. I held still and let her find it. Her sphinx came forward off her shoulder while the front of her was still searching, already sure, already mine. The knowing was there the whole time, underneath. It just took her face a breath to catch up to what her sphinx already had. Then she found it.
“Well,” she said. “Well. Look who it is. Look who it is.” And she had me by the front of my coat, pulling me down into the house, calling back over her shoulder to a house with nobody else in it that her son was here, her son and his Elara, as if the walls themselves would want to know.
“I forgot you were coming,” she said, “Is something happening this weekend?”
She pulled Elara in and held her a long moment. The house took us in the way that house does, warm and a little too hot the way she keeps it now, the clock ticking in the hall. And somewhere upstairs the good sheets were already on my old bed. Some part of her always knows, even when the front of her does not.
“We just didn’t want you to be alone this weekend mom. Winter and her family are coming by tomorrow morning too.”
We sat in the kitchen a while. She put the kettle on without asking, because in that house a late arrival means tea whether you want it or not, and I wanted it. She asked after everyone by name, the whole list, Winter and the Center and was Elara eating enough, and her sphinx sat settled and easy on the back of her chair the whole time, no searching in it now, home ground. The front of her comes and goes these days. The sphinx is somewhat steady, the glitches and fuzzes coming intermittently.
I fell asleep in my childhood room, Elara tucked in next to me, thinking about the future of the center, about my childhood growing further in the past, and about the present where a woman is slowly forgetting her own past, and her present.
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Revolutionary War Fact of the Day: On October 16, 1781, the British army trapped at Yorktown, Virginia made its last two attempts to escape, and the war would not let it. At dawn, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercrombie led a sortie against the allied siege lines, spiked a few American and French cannon, and was driven back within the hour. That night, Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis tried the only real escape left. He began ferrying his army across the York River to break out to the north, and had moved part of it over when a sudden violent storm scattered the boats and wrecked the crossing. The men already across had to be brought back under fire. By morning there was nothing left to try. General George Washington’s guns kept firing, and on the seventeenth Cornwallis asked for terms. Some traps a man fights his way out of. Some close no matter how bravely he tries the door, and all that is left is how he carries what comes after.