HALFWAY by Richard Chiappone
When my folks and I arrived in the little town on the bay on a Saturday afternoon in November, ice fog glittered in the near- dark streets as if tiny silver fish were shoaling in the frozen air. I’d never seen that before. I’d never seen winter. The digital sign at the Alaska USA Credit Union read – 2°, an aberration, I would learn, for the normally temperate maritime climate. I watched my mother glance at that and then turn her eyes on our new hometown – two stoplights, one gas station, a handful of bars and pizza places, and the big regional hospital where my father was about to start his new job.
A week before, on the road from Orlando, I’d turned seventeen, and I thought I knew a few things about the world. Like my mother, for example. I thought I knew all about her. She was exactly twice my age, for instance, and twenty years younger than my father. Me, my mother, my father: 17, 34, 54. It sounded like a locker combination. She was plain and a little skinny and had small, sharp teeth, but she smiled like a young girl, a smile so genuine, everyone turned her way. Men especially. At parties back home in Florida, the guys from my father’s office clustered around her like bees on tupelo. It was like having a wonderfully popular big sister.
On the long drive north, we’d spent our days crammed in the Subaru, nights in the dismal motels that clung to the snowed- over prairies and mountains we crossed. And now, at the end, my mother stared out the windshield at the town, her face slack. It was like she’d left her smile by the side of the road somewhere thousands of miles behind us and had no reason to go looking for it. If she’d asked, I would’ve walked all the way back to Florida to find it for her.
If my father noticed the change in her, he didn’t show it. He turned to me over the seat back eagerly. “This is it, Charlie. The end of the road. To go any farther than this, you need a boat or a plane.”
I nodded, my eyes still on my mother. I thought she was staring at the ghostly white cone of the dead volcano on the other side of the bay, but then I realized her eyes were focused on the window glass itself, or maybe her reflection in it. Maybe my father saw that too. I was never sure how much my father saw.
“What do you think, Grace?” he asked.
“I think I need to go to confession,” she said.
I guess every son must wonder what sins his mother might be capable of. I’d learned in catechism classes that even the desire to commit a sin can be a sin itself, and I tried not to think about the things my mother might want. I had desires of my own.
We drove to the town’s Catholic church, St. Anthony’s, a small, white clapboard building perched on the edge of a bluff overlooking the ice- choked bay, its stained glass windows the only specks of color in the gray and white world. After confession – I’d offered up my usual litany of boring, juvenile sins – we drove ten miles further up the road to a two- story house in a dense spruce forest, a house that my father, in his excitement about the new job, had purchased – furnished, but sight unseen, except for the Zillow video. We’d covered four hundred wintry Alaskan miles that day on the last leg of the drive. I collapsed into a strange bed, my father’s excited voice percolating through the walls of our new home, my mother’s silence hovering in the cool night air.
In the morning I awoke to the sounds of them talking again, as though they’d been at it all night. My mother stood in front of the oilfired Toyo stove in the living room wearing the ankle- length, quilted down coat she’d bought online for this trip. The fabric was a shimmery silver. With the pointy hood up, she looked like a rocket ready to launch.
My father sighed, “Grace, really, check the records. This cold isn’t normal.”
“You’re right,” she said, staring at the dark forest outside the windows. “Nothing about this is normal.”
***
Back in Orlando, when I first noticed that things were bad between them, my mother told my father that she needed “alone time.” She rented an apartment and wouldn’t tell him where. I’d heard her whispering into her phone to someone and understood that she wasn’t spending her alone time entirely alone. I assumed my father had not figured that out. I didn’t know whether to tell him or not, and I waited for the right time. Then, when he got the job offer in Alaska, my mother surprised us both and agreed to leave her secret apartment and make the trip with us. I told myself everything was all right again. I think my father did too. He said, “This is going to be okay, Grace. They say the polar regions are warming faster than anyplace on earth. You know, climate change! Global whatever.”
“I know,” she said, smiling, but not convincingly this time. “I’m sure that’s true.”
There was little evidence of planetary warming on the drive up. The farther north we got, the shorter the days were, the colder the nights, the quieter my mother became. For the final thousand miles she hunkered down in that big coat, silent, the heater blasting her ankles, me in the back seat with my AirPods cranked up loud and the window cracked, sniffing the icy air and trying to imagine this new life we’d be starting. Somewhere in the Yukon, my mother the literature major muttered, “There’s a reason Dante made the worst circle of hell ice.”
***
The weather was so awful that first Sunday in our new town, she considered staying home from church. For her that was like agreeing to sacrifice babies to Satan. But when zealous push came to pious shove, nothing could stop Grace Ventry from attending Mass. I wasn’t sure if it was her devotion, or just an attempt to find something familiar in this place.
The furnace in St. Anthony’s had died during the night and the interior of the church was not much warmer than outside. In the windows the martyrs’ stained glass faces shimmered with frost. They looked like they were regretting their heroics. God the Father’s white beard was fringed with ice. His son hung on the cross above the altar, half- naked and freezing for our sins on top of everything else he’d suffered. Only the Holy Spirit – invisible, unknowable, and impossible to depict – escaped the punishing cold. For all anyone knew, that most mysterious member of the Trinity might have been wintering back in Florida.
There weren’t a lot of warm bodies to help heat the church. Most sensible parishioners apparently interpreted the end- of-the- world cold as a sign that God wanted them to stay close to their furnace vents until He came for them. But the visiting priest, Father Brenehan, declared in a theatrical Irish brogue that this was an opportunity to demonstrate our convictions. He wore his surplice over a long wool coat and scarf, conducting the noon Mass in a cloud of devout breath. Clearly pleased, my mother followed along in her missal, eyes alive, face flushed. I could barely keep from staring at her. The three of us received communion side by side, receiving the host with our gloved hands.
After Mass Father Brenehan stood on the front steps, hatless, thick black hair writhing in the wind. He shook his flock’s hands, grinning like it was a warm and pleasant Sunday afternoon someplace actually suitable for human habitation. He was handsome in that charming, unkempt way only the Irish can pull off. My mother suddenly felt like talking. If my father and I hadn’t coaxed her to the car, I think she would have stood there chatting with the priest until the two of them had frozen into statues.
***
Driving home on the narrow two- lane that wound through the forest to our subdivision, wind- driven snow twisters spun across the frosty pavement ahead of our car. My mother had gone silent again. My father started to say something to her but abruptly hit the brakes. We skidded to a stop. A Chevy work van sat parked on the shoulder of the road ahead, ladders and scaffold frames stacked on top, back doors thrown open. A man and a girl dressed in Sunday clothes struggled with the body of a large dead animal of some kind, trying to drag the bloody thing up a ramp of scaffold planks into the back of the truck.
“Holy moly! They’ve hit something,” my father said, and pulled over.
“Of course,” my mother said. She nodded as though she’d known all along that we’d end up someplace like this.
It was a moose calf, only about six months old, but must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. Its mother, a gaunt cow moose, stood in the snow up to her lumpy knees at the edge of the forest a hundred feet away, munching on willow twigs. She seemed equally uninter-ested in us or her dead offspring, maybe knowing she had to keep eating to get through the winter.
My father and I got out and ran to help.
In spite of the bitter cold, the girl – she looked about my age – wore just a green cloth coat over a dress and heels, the man a dark suit and a tie. The girl was tall and blond, with a zigzag scar on one cheek, a cleft in her sharp chin, and gold- green eyes gone teary in the wind. In her heels, she towered over the much shorter man – her father, presumably. He had an oddly small head on a long neck, coppery hair silvering above each sideburn. His hatchet- blade face was so narrow it forced his eyes almost on top of each other. He gave us a look like he thought we were there to take that moose calf away from him.
My father said, “Let us give you a hand,” and the man’s fierce eyes relaxed. But once the four of us had wrestled the awkward carcass up into the van, he slammed the back doors and hurried to strap the bloodied planks up onto the ladder racks. My father yanked off one glove and held out his hand in the frigid air. “Tom Ventry,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. And this is Charlie. Just moved in. Salmonberry Lane.”
“Salmonberry Lane?” the girl said brightly. “We live on Salmonberry.”
“Well, isn’t that something?” My father continued to hold his hand out.
I continued to stare at the girl.
The man finally pulled his own glove off and shook with my father. “Jacob Dexter,” he said. “That’s Jane.” He nodded toward the girl. “My wife.”
The guy was my father’s age, maybe older.
Clearly unsure what to say to that, my father asked, “Do you folks go to St. Anthony’s?” As if we could’ve missed seeing them in the little church.
Jane smiled and shook her head. “We’re Mormon.”
Here was a very tall, very blond girl who was something other than Catholic. I’d attended Catholic schools all my life in Florida, went to Catholic dances with Catholic girls – mostly short, dark, and bilingual. I prepared to be my wittiest. But inside the van, a baby began to cry. Jane sighed and climbed in the passenger door.
“Much obliged for the help,” her husband said curtly. He strode around to the driver’s side of the van and started it. Through the rear window, I saw Jane staring back over the child’s seat, certain she was looking at me.
The van shifted into gear with a thump, and the cow moose lumbered off through the snow snorting with irritation. My father and I stood for another moment in the piercing cold watching the huge animal until my mother tapped the horn and waved us back to the car. At home, she walked straight to the stove in the living room still wearing her coat, any warmth the Mass, the sacrament, or the dashing priest had generated in her gone now.
“They’re Mormons,” my father said, trying to start a conversation, “the Dexters.”
My mother stared at the stove, palms out to the heat. “Well, if anyone can endure a wilderness, it’ll be Mormons.”
“They live down the road,” I said, wondering if either of them was going to say anything about this girl being married to a man that old. My mother looked at my father. “You should know better than to do something like this.”
He said, “Grace, this is my career break. I’m not going to get another one. Not at my age. You know that.” I understood that the hospital had offered him a top administration job he’d never come close to anywhere else he’d worked. “We’ve only been here one day,” he said. “You promised you’d give the place a chance.”
I looked at her, hoping she would say something reassuring. Staring down at my father’s feet, she said, “You’ve got blood on your cuff, Tom.”
***
We’d celebrated my seventeenth birthday somewhere in the Dakotas in a restaurant called The Trough. The building was made to look like an old- timey saloon, but the parking lot was crammed with shiny Escalades and Lincoln Navigators. Wealthy ranchers or maybe oil men with thick necks and thin ties ate dinner with women in tight jeans and western shirts, lots of turquoise jewelry. My mother sat at our table bundled in her quilted coat, looking like a small package of something breakable. She hadn’t spoken six words all that day on the drive across the endless prairies.
My father was so happy he insisted she have one of the most expensive things on the menu, duck breast with peppercorns, her favorite. He ordered champagne because it was my birthday, and because we were almost halfway to our new home. My mother barely touched her food or her drink.
“Halfway,” my father said, rubbing his palms together. “Halfway there.”
When he excused himself to go to the restroom, my mother took her phone out of her purse and read a text and pulled her lips in tight. She put it away and managed a smile for me, her eyelids heavy.
“Happy birthday, Charlie,” she murmured and looked around the restaurant at the glass- eyed elk and mule deer heads displayed on the walls alongside rusty farm tools and old photos of ranchers and miners and lawmen. Her eyes landed on a group of saloon girls in low- cut dresses grinning at the camera. “How young,” she said. She turned back to me. “And you. Seventeen!” She set one hand on my arm. “I was your age now when you were born. You know that, right?”
She looked so serious I had to laugh. “Mom, I can do the math.”
She just nodded.
I said, “Are you going to be all right?”
She looked at me for a moment and said, “Charlie, someday you’ll understand that a person . . .” Then she looked up and saw my father approaching, on his way back from the men’s room, smiling and exchanging pleasantries with complete strangers, and she went quiet again, and I knew that we were all halfway to somewhere all right.
***
The next afternoon, after my first day in public school, the bus dropped me off at the corner where the gravel road met the paved two- lane, a half- mile from our house. The temperature still hovered around zero, the air silent except for the soft squeaking of my boot soles against the frozen snow. Small black- and- white birds flitted across the road from one heavily forested side to the other and I told myself I should learn the names of the local wildlife. I walked along thinking about my mother’s use of the word “wilderness.” I liked the sound of that, the idea of doing something adventurous. It was still on my mind when a big, dark blue Chevy Suburban pulled alongside me, blond hair behind the wheel.
Jane lowered the window. “Charlie, right? Need a ride?”
She’d remembered my name.
I stammered, “It’s a short walk.”
Jane laughed. “Get in. It’s freezing!”
There was a box of Skittles lying open on the dashboard, a halffull bottle of orange soda nestled in a cup holder. Jane was wearing heavy canvas work pants and a matching coat, a black knit watch cap yanked down to her ears, blond hair flaring out from under it, boots. She looked like she was about to march out into the snow and cut down a tree or check a trapline. I thought about her husband’s rat- thin face, those tiny, angry eyes. But I got in.
The baby was strapped into a car seat behind us. It had a perfectly round head and smooth, wide face unlike either Jane’s or her husband’s. I said, “Hi, buddy.”
“That’s Ammon,” Jane said. She put the Suburban in gear.
“Nice car.” I wanted to talk about something else. “How come you went to church in the work van yesterday instead of this?”
“I forgot to plug in the block heater Saturday night. Froze. Jacob thinks it has a faulty battery.”
She drove a bit further before I managed to say, “Your husband,” and stalled out.
“My husband?” She looked back, behind us.
“No, I just mean . . . I just mean, he’s not very friendly.”
She relaxed. “Oh, yesterday? That calf? We needed to get off the road. There’s a rotating list you’re supposed to sign if you want to claim road meat. When a moose gets hit, the troopers call you. Jacob doesn’t believe in cooperating with the police or the state.”
We’d arrived at the foot of my driveway. I got out, but held the door open, hesitating.
“What do you want to ask me?” she said. “Go ahead. I’m used to it.”
“Your husband . . . He’s older.”
Her face went serious. “My mother signed for me to marry at sixteen. That’s one law Jacob couldn’t get around.”
I stood there, holding the door open. “You wanted to?”
“Charlie . . . ” She looked at me with the kind of benevolent pity you’d offer a sadly dense family member. “My baby needed a father.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, like I talked to girls about such matters all the time. I closed the door, and watched her drive away, a teenage girl raising a child with an old man. I, of all people, could understand that that happens.
***
When I walked into our house I hit a wall of humid heat, the oil stove running as hot as it could go, frost ferns climbing the windowpanes. My mother was on the phone. “Yes, I’ll see you soon then. Goodbye.”
She hung up.
“Mom,” I said, “You’ll see him soon? Seriously?” I wanted her to know I knew about the man in Orlando.
“It was Father Brenehan. He called to check on us new parishioners.” Her eyes were bright, her lips wet.
“Oh,” I said, not sure if I believed that. Not sure if I even wanted to believe it. “The priest.”
She frowned. “What did you think?”
“I don’t know,” I lied and went to my room and stayed there until dinner, trying to do homework, though my mind kept turning to Jane Dexter, somewhere just down the road.
At dinner I noticed that my mother never mentioned that phone call – whoever it really was. I didn’t say anything. Keeping my mother’s secrets seemed to have become my job, and it made me feel very grown up. Anyway, my father was distracted and so wiped out by his first day at the hospital I don’t think he heard anything either of us said.
That night I lay in bed listening to the icy trees scrape the roof overhangs, telling myself that I really did know a few things about the world. Just not enough. For example, why did my mother change her mind and agree to come to Alaska with us? Why did she move back in with my father and me to help pack our stuff, when every time my father was out of sight, she was on her phone talking secretively? Some of the calls were long and bitter- sounding. So, she had quarreled with the man in Orlando – whoever he was – but we’d just got here, and she was already talking to him again? Unless of course it really had been Father Brenehan on the phone. No, I didn’t know nearly enough.
***
The next day some pipes froze and broke at the school. They dismissed us at noon. I came home to find a dented, wine- colored Kia parked in our driveway. In the sweltering living room, my mother was sitting on the couch with the priest, pouring tea. She wore a deep blue sweater that made her pale eyes seem brighter. She’d put on lipstick. Her cheeks were pink, her hair combed, and she looked truly warm for the first time in two weeks. She had one thin ankle crossed over the other, sitting up as straight as a spruce tree. She poured the tea and smiled at something the priest said. Handsome Father Brenehan grinned with delight, his leprechaun charm machine set on high. I said hello and told them about the early dismissal.
Father Brenehan beamed. “A day off school. Lucky lad! Charlie, isn’t it? We met after Mass.”
It seemed that this was a place where people remembered my name.
My mother said, “That reminds me, we saw the darnedest thing on the way home from church.” She told him about the Dexters and the dead moose calf, then lowered her voice as though Jane and her husband might be able to hear from their house down the road. “They’re Mormons.”
“Ah, the Latter- Day Saints!” The priest winked to let me know he was goofing. “Well, you can never have too many saints, I suppose.” More seriously, he said, “Good people, Mormons. Hard workers. And they help each other in time of need. I wish more of us did.”
“They certainly have some funny beliefs,” my mother said, thoughtfully.
“Right,” I scoffed, “like ours aren’t?”
“Charlie!” She gaped at me, aghast.
But the priest chuckled. “He’s right, Grace. Our God is three different people at the same time? How about transubstantiation? Or the Blessed Virgin? A fifteen- year- old girl impregnated by nothing more than the words of an angel? Well, now...”
“That was a great miracle,” my mother said, hesitantly, clearly interested in the questions he was raising.
“It was a miracle her parents believed her!” he joked.
I laughed to be polite, but thought of Jane, of course, not nearly as lucky as the Virgin Mary.
My mother smiled and shook her head, still thinking about it in her charming, serious way.
I said, “So, Father, are you getting my mother to organize the ladies at church? Back in Orlando she was active in the Catholic Daughters of the Americas.”
“I only wish I were going to be around long enough to do that,” he said.
My mother’s smile began to disassemble. “What do you mean?” she asked him.
“I’m itinerant. My time here’s up. Father Silvestri will be back tonight. He’s bringing Costco supplies down from Anchorage in a van we borrowed from St. Mary’s. I’ll drive it back to the big city tomorrow and fly out on the red- eye.”
“Tomorrow?” she said, hesitantly. “That’s too bad.”
I could feel the room temperature crashing. “That is too bad,” I said, and meant it. I stood there looking at my mother’s darkening face for a moment and realized she might want to talk to him alone. “Well, I’ve got homework,” I said, and went up the stairs. I closed my bedroom door loudly, but stood in the hall, listening.
“Nice lad, Grace,” Father Brenehan said.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving so soon.”
There was a pause. “I have to go where I’m needed.”
“Where you’re needed.” She said it flatly, but I heard the sadness in it. “I see.”
Father Brenehan murmured something I couldn’t make out.
“Oh,” she said, “I’ll have to think about that.”
I slipped into my room and quietly closed the door.
***
There was no school again Wednesday. At breakfast my mother told my father she needed the car. “I’ll drive you to work, pick you up tonight.” She’d put on good clothes again and makeup. In spite of the winter morning darkness leaning against the windows, she showed the same bright spirits I’d seen the day before when the priest was there. But there was something still on her mind. She said she was meeting with some women at the church. I wanted to ask her what she was really doing. I wanted my father to ask her.
He just said, “Sure, take the car.” He had a file folder open on the kitchen table and he didn’t look up from it. Those first few days in his new job must’ve been murder. He stayed at the hospital late each afternoon and brought home stacks of papers, pawing through them into the night, his computer screen glowing in the mostly dark house. “I’ll call you when I get done at the office,” he told her. He gathered his papers and went out to warm up the car.
I waited for my mother to tell me the truth. She glanced in the hall mirror, got into her coat, and pulled the hood up. “There’re leftovers in the fridge, honey,” she said without turning my way. “Be sure to eat some lunch.” She pulled open the front door and stood peering into the still- dark forest. There was no wind now, the only sound the purring of the Subaru’s engine. She took in a quick breath of the frigid air and started to cross the threshold.
“Mom,” I said, stopping her.
Her head spun my way. With her face encircled by her hood, she looked like some kind of modern nun. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked, managing a small, tentative smile.
I waited again. One last chance. But she was silent.
“I can make my own lunch,” I told her.
She said, “I know you can, Charlie,” stepped out the door, and pulled it shut behind her.
***
Mid- morning the winter sun finally made an appearance in the cloudless sky, an icy white disc, as though it too had frozen. I bundled up and went out and walked on Salmonberry Lane through a canyon of frosted spruce trees. It looked like a Christmas card. A half- mile down the gravel road, I came to a driveway with Jane’s big Chevy Suburban parked in it. Her husband’s work van was nowhere around.
The forest had been bulldozed off the Dexters’ property. At the far end of the denuded lot lay a huge pile of uprooted trees, their skeletal branches densely tangled in the ice and snow, root wads pawing at the sky. There were stacks of lumber, a flat trailer loaded with cement blocks, some kind of big orange compressor or generator maybe. The house was a single- story box with gray wood siding in need of paint, mossy green shingles visible through the thin snow on the roof. A twist of acrid wood smoke curled from the chimney. Squatting in the middle of the treeless lot, the house looked very small and sad, and I tried to picture lovely Jane Dexter, or any teenage girl, raising a baby in that dreary place.
I stood there telling myself this was none of my business and that I should go back home. The door opened. Jane was wearing a lumpy yellow bathrobe. Her hair looked wet and clung to her neck. Heavy socks sagged around her ankles. The block- headed baby, Ammon, sat perched on one hip, nestled in the crook of Jane’s elbow. Jane tipped her head and pressed the back of her free hand against the scar on her cheek. “I wondered if you’d visit,” she said.
I looked at the baby, and the baby looked back at me like he was waiting to see what I was going to do next. That’s how things happen. One thing leads to another.
***
When my mother didn’t show up at the hospital that evening, my father, busy as always, called me and asked me to phone St. Anthony’s. I spoke with the regular parish priest, Father Silvestri. He said he hadn’t seen her, and asked how we were liking Alaska. I assured him we were settling in nicely. I mentioned that I had enjoyed Father Brenehan, and inquired, innocently, where his new assignment had taken him. My father got a ride home from one of his staff.
Later that night he called the police, but the police said there wasn’t much they could do until she’d been missing for twenty- four hours. They found our Subaru abandoned in the Safeway parking lot the next morning. The store’s security cameras showed her walking away from the car, but then lost sight of her. The state troopers used a dog to track her until her trail vanished in the snow. There was no record of her departing on the commuter airline that served the town, and the Alaska Marine Highway ferry was not in port that week.
One of the investigators, a thin Black man, said, “Mr. Ventry, don’t take this the wrong way, but has your wife ever done anything like this before? Because if not, then we have to start thinking foul play, and that’s a whole different thing, if you see what I mean. So, is there any chance she just went off on her own?”
“No,” my father said with incredible certainty. “She would never do that.”
“Never,” I said.
***
My father took the next day off work. Together we drove around looking for her, my father seeming to think she’d be out there in that bulky coat of hers wandering the snowy streets. I went along, said nothing.
In the afternoon we drove out into the hills around town, a world of gravel pits and sorry homesteads, two- track driveways strangled with naked alders, collapsing boats forever marooned in snowedover yards. I wanted badly to tell him she wasn’t coming back and how I knew that. But who wants to break that kind of news to his own father?
The days were getting shorter quickly now, and the winter sun was already descending behind the mountains across Cook Inlet when, late in the afternoon, my father pulled over into the gravel parking lot of a defunct tire shop and stopped. I looked around, wondering why we were there. When I looked back, my father had his head down, chin to his chest, mumbling something unintelligible.
“Dad?”
He looked up, seemingly surprised to find me there. He sat up straighter and peered at me a moment. Then he smiled ruefully. “Charlie,” he said, “how long have you known?”
I looked at my knees. “I didn’t want to say anything,” I said.
He put the car in gear and pulled back out onto the road and said, “Yeah. I didn’t either.” And we drove home through that terrible cold, both of us knowing that my mother was already someplace warm.
***
Friday morning my father returned to his job at the hospital, and I went back to school. But first, I called the police and told them the story my father had concocted: we’d heard from her; she was with relatives somewhere; it was all a misunderstanding.
Saturday, I took the car and drove to St. Anthony’s. The cold snap had broken by then, and God and the stained glass saints had thawed and looked pleased once more. The interior of the church glowed in the warm, colored sunlight as I waited my turn for the confessional, trying to find a way to admit what I had done. I’d been making confessions since my First Communion when I was eight years old. But this was the first time I had a truly adult sin to offer a priest. A real doozy. It had a whole commandment of its own. Plus, I was making Jane Dexter break a different one for married people.
Father Silvestri took it all very seriously. He gave me a heavy penance and made me swear I wouldn’t talk to Jane again until that ter-rible temptation, as he called it, had disappeared from my heart and mind. I promised him on my immortal soul that I would stay away from her, and I meant it when I said it. But I was young and still wanted to believe that a person could be expected to keep a promise, or that, if things went badly, for whatever reason, he – or she – could always find a way to come back and fix the ones they’d broken. That’s what I wanted to believe.
Richard Chiappone is the author of the novel The Hunger of Crows (Crooked Lane Books, 2021) and three collections of short fiction, including Uncommon Weather (University of Alaska Press, 2024). His stories have appeared in Playboy, The Sun, Missouri Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and ZYZZYVA.