A Few Miles South on the Highway

Her brother Charlie would’ve liked this. 

The moisture from the stone of the bridge was soaking through her pants and drops were beginning to pool on the plastic wrap of the flower bouquet beside her. 

“I find it refreshing,” he might say as he leaned back and pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. 

“You would, wouldn’t you,” she would respond. “Don’t light that.” 

“Wasn’t going to,” He’d put the unlit cigarette into his mouth, “I just like to see your reaction.” He’d return her scowl with a lopsided smile. 

Rain always had one of two effects on Charlie: an unfocused gaze at the view in front of him, or the uncontrollable urge to tease her into annoyance. In hindsight, she preferred remembering the latter. 

The bridge she sat on overlooked a wide river that separated the rest of the town from the cemetery. Willow trees dotted the small lot, dancing among the headstones. It might have been a pretty spot if it weren’t so miserable out. 

“Well, it must be nice to sit with a view like this after being away from home so long. Good way to pass the time, you know, until you make up your mind,” Charlie’s voice of reason nagged in her mind. She pushed it away. 

It hadn’t taken long to visit the people she was still close to in the little town. She even drove past the old house, sitting sunken and desolate.  

The river churned beneath her. 

“His new house is right over there, just a few miles south on the highway, you know,” the voice that was like Charlie’s said. 

“I know that,” she snapped at the thought. 

* * *

Her dad loved to tell stories. He would sit in his fading brown recliner and tell them again and again until he was telling the same ones twice. To her and her brother as kids they were as wild as any fantastical tale, but fantasy was not their father’s specialty. He told them his own stories: old friends, rough jobs, everything he’d ever learned from everyone he’d ever known. 

He told the story of his childhood. 

“You know what we did,” he’d say on hot summer nights, “when we were young on days like today.”  

With wide eyes, they’d scooch closer to his feet and wait for his response. 

The next day they’d beg to do the crazy things he told them about. He would laugh. 

“My dad never helped me. Go and figure it out, just don’t do anything stupid.”

Out of his sight, they would tie up ropes to swing into the river with, plan missions to capture the rabbits in the back yard, or fly down the biggest hill on their road, riding on top of the old wood dolly they slipped out of the garage. By the time they stumbled on their aching feet back to the house their father would be fast asleep in the old recliner. 

* * *

Some days her father said very little. 

“Hurry up,” he’d snap during visits to the grocery store, as they picked out the boxed mac and cheese and spaghetti for the coming week’s meals. The sharp gazes that came from turning heads would force her to look down at her blue butterfly shoes. 

She walked out of the store on these days with her face red and hot, but not as much as on his loud days. These were accompanied by echoing complaints her father hoped would be heard by the manager across the store or remarks to the poor cashier—rude ones if he felt the bread price was too high, nicer ones if he thought she was nice. 

When they got back home, he would collapse back into his chair. 

“I just need a break.”

She and Charlie would play outside, out of earshot, into the evening. 

Sometimes on those nights she would slip into the kitchen for a glass of water, only a few hours before the sun was supposed to come up, and see her father sitting in the living room and staring like an illuminated ghost at the muted television. She would tip-toe back to her bedroom. 

* * *

“He’s getting married to that lady, what’s her name again?” Charlie’s voice nudged. She pulled the bent engagement announcement out of her pocket, even though she already had it memorized. 

Claudia. 

That was the name written next to her fathers in looping gold calligraphy. It was the first time she had seen his fiancé’s name, resting below an image of him and the woman smiling together on a beach. 

“She seems nice,” Charlie proposed, in the voice she remembered him using when he tried to convince her of the benefits she would reap if she made him dinner. 

She turned the card over to read the address scrawled in her father’s large handwriting on the back, careful not to let the rain smudge the ink. 

She thought back to the broken chairs, holes in the wall, endless tirades, and heavy silence. 

“She doesn’t know him well enough,” she thought. “She wouldn’t stay if she did.”

* * *

As they got older, the stories became less about his childhood days or heroic triumphs. He still told the tales of his life, but in these he wove important lessons. Lessons about street smarts, politics, the “ins and outs”. 

“People will try to screw you over if they get the chance. Like this asshole,” he pointed to a green sedan which had just cut across in front of him on the highway. He stepped on the gas and swerved around the car with an accompanying hand gesture. 

“They’ll step all over you if you let them. I know you’re young and might not know what I’m talking about yet, but you will. I didn’t listen to my Dad either when he said all this, but I learned soon enough.”

At the time she nodded vigorously. Her father had told her many times about how he left home fresh out of high school and never went back. She thought then that perhaps his dad taught him so well that he didn’t need to. Her brother had remained stony-faced, staring out the car window. He never said much of anything to their father until he was in high school himself. 

When she was twelve, she sat in her closet with her hands clamped over her ears. Something crashed to the ground downstairs. Her father yelled. Charlie yelled louder. 

“Jesus Christ.” 

“This is my fucking house, do you understand? You’re living in my goddamn house. I don’t have to let you stay.” 

The walls vibrated. 

“Like I want to stay in this fucking house with you while you sit there like a bum because you never bothered to get off your ass and do anything but complain about—"

The sound of an overturned chair hitting the linoleum made her flinch. 

“Go out and see for yourself then. One day you’ll realize I was right.” Her father’s voice echoed through the walls. 

“Cynical bastard.” Charlie spat. 

The chorus of profane verses intensified, louder and louder until the slam of the back screen door signaled the end of the sparring. A dull pounding told her that her father was punishing the house and his fists in the way he could never bear to punish Charlie. 

When she was fourteen, she stood next to the long-forgotten hole in the kitchen wall and watched Charlie tell her father that he was moving up to the mountains. He needed to get away from this house, he said. So, he left, letting his father fade far behind him and promising himself he would never become him. 

Like father, like son. 

* * *

Her father’s quiet days became more frequent after Charlie left. The only exception to this was talking about her brother. 

First, it was Charlie’s fault. 

“He’ll be back,” he assured himself. 

Then it was the world’s fault. Eventually, when the prickling in her chest became too strong to ignore, she spoke up. 

“He left because of you,” she shouted, rattling off variations of every attitude or action that she believed had pushed Charlie over the edge. 

Once she started, these reminders became all she was interested in saying to her father. She fantasized about leaving too. In the few weeks between Charlie’s departure and the first time she visited him, she couldn’t help but imagine how free he felt. 

For their first visit, they met at a diner after his shift, and she watched as he stared down at his coffee mug with a familiar frown. 

“I’m alright. I’ve just been working a lot,” he insisted, but even after he quit that job, and the next, the goofy smile she remembered never returned.

She told herself it was just the transition, that he would get used to things eventually. She even thought he might start visiting home again after her father got a new job and left mounds of voicemails asking Charlie to visit, to call, to meet up for coffee. Charlie never did. Instead, he drowned his frown in habits he hid when she visited him. In the end she never found out for sure whether it was pills or just the shadows in his mind, but it only took two years for his new life to swallow him whole. 

Later she chose to attend college across the country, thinking that grief could not follow her so far away. 

“I’m gonna try to work on some of the things we talked about. Just visit when you can, okay?” her father said in a strained voice over the rolled down window of the pick-up truck, in front of the airport. 

She nodded and turned away before he finished speaking. 

* * *

The clouds over the river were getting darker.  

“Neither of us could stand him though,” she said to the Charlie in her mind. 

She could picture his idle shrug. 

“He had his problems.” 

A lot of problems. So many she couldn’t help but think how different her life would be, or Charlie’s life would have been, if he had been a better father—a real and proper dad. 

The Charlie of her thoughts mulled this over. 

 “He wasn’t a proper dad. He should have been, maybe even could have been, but he wasn’t.” 

The water rushed freely below. She pictured the address on the engagement card again, and the words just above it—You’ll like her. She thought back to every one of her dad’s voicemails left unopened on Charlie’s phone. 

“Whatever new life he’s made, he wants you to be a part of it,” Charlie’s voice said. 

“I know,” she sighed.  

* * *

There had been very few things that bothered her about her father’s house when she was little. She didn’t mind the creaking cabinets or the mismatched furniture. She did mind that the walls were frail and hollow, like a forgotten statue one touch away from crumbling. When it stormed, the house would shake, and the wind would whistle through the cracks. 

On one of these nights she dreamed a dream that woke her suddenly to the hammering of her own heart and the house’s unseen murmurs. 

It was late, but she knew by the muffled sound of the television that her father was awake. She dashed downstairs, making a beeline for his chair, before the shadows could catch her. 

He held her as she wept without explanation, stroking her hair and rocking the chair slowly.  

“Bad night?” he whispered. “I know the feeling. It’s okay.” 

* * *

She had been there far longer than she meant to be. 

She walked the short distance to the graves poking up by the water’s edge. His headstone wasn’t hard to find, but by the time she did, her hair was beginning to drip. She stayed just long enough to set the bouquet under Charlie’s name before hurrying through muddy puddles back to the car. 

After copying the new address into the GPS, she pulled out of the lot, heading south on the highway.

About the Author

Jewel Miller is a Junior Media and Communications student with a concentration in Multimedia Publishing and a minor in Creative Writing. Despite being a comms major, she is passionate about exploring all things writing and photography, and tries to incorporate both in her study. Jewel currently manages the Quiddity social media and also serves as the Print Edition Director for the Philly lifestyle magazine Loco Mag. She was eager to join Quiddity and see all the talent that Arcadia’s writing community has to offer. In her free time, she enjoys taking walks (preferably ones where she can look at trees), going on adventures with her friends, and spending time with her cat and dog.