Chapter 4 - Dale
As to where Raynette was, or why Pete was alone with two little girls was a question that would have to wait.
The more important thing was to figure out how to best take care of Pete.
Which meant either making the trailer livable by fixing the heating, and checking the windows to make sure they were all closed properly.
Apply a bottle of Pine-Sol to get rid of the musty, moldy smell.
Make something to eat for Melanie and Rebecca. Wake Pete up–
Pete sat up as if suddenly aware that there was someone standing over him, and that he and his two little girls were not alone.
“Rebecca?” he asked, rubbing his chest as if holding back a cough. “Melanie?”
“Daddy,” said Melanie. She came close and sat beside him amongst the frowsy flump of cheap blanket. Rebecca came and stood right by her. “A man is here.”
Dale realized he’d never introduced himself to the girls, but he’d been so intent on getting them off the road and out of bad weather that it had gone clean out of his mind.
Now, on top of the absence of that nicety, he was looking straight into the tired brown eyes of the boy he’d once loved, a thousand thoughts swirling inside of his brain, memories of starlit nights, and breakfast, just the two of them, at the local Denny’s.
And the time he’d leaned forward, determined to brave it out, waiting for the touch of those sweet lips on his.
That’s when the waitress had come by, and that’s when Pete had spotted Raynette.
Who, as Dale recalled with a sudden, painful burst of clarity, had, at that moment, begun her campaign to win Pete over.
A girl who, Dale recalled with a dart of pain to his heart, was later rumored to already have been pregnant when she’d fetched up to Pete.
He guessed he couldn’t blame her for trying to fix her life so she’d have a chance in hell to bring those kids up right, but did she have to pick Pete? Did she have to take Pete all the way to Texas and, effectively, cut Pete off from all of his friends, including Dale?
Well, maybe Pete was the father, and maybe he wasn’t. But that didn’t matter now. What did matter was that Dale had to make a decisions and that right quick, as to whether he’d fix up the trailer, heat up a frozen pizza, dose Pete with some Theraflu, and leave–
Or.
Or he was going to pack them all into his truck and take them home with him.
His small white farmhouse was tight as a drum, stocked with supplies, and could shelter them all.
A blizzard was coming, and by nightfall the roads would be slick with ice and everywhere would be covered with six inches of snow, or maybe more, depending on how hard the wind blew everything into drifts.
“Hey, Pete, it’s me. Dale.” Dale crouched by the couch in the same way he’d crouched down next to Melanie and Rebecca on that snow-strewn road. “How long have you been sick? Is it a bad cold or something worse?”
“Flu, I think.” Pete’s doubled over cough, punctuated by him clasping his chest, made up Dale’s mind for him.
“Do you remember me?” Dale asked, just to be sure.
Pete nodded, looking up at Dale, his face drawn and pale, those brown eyes sad and dim.
In those eyes, Dale searched for the memory of what they’d once shared, those laughs at school, hanging around their shared locker.
The time they snuck off campus to go to McDonalds, surely the most forbidden of treats, particularly during school hours.
When they’d experimented with pot just before band class.
When they’d both signed up to try out for the baseball team, and both failed miserably.
But they’d snuck a bottle of Pete’s mom’s gin and hung out at the baseball field, sitting on the bleachers in the moonlight, just about holding hands as they traded that small bottle back and forth.
Dale had not minded not playing baseball, not as long as he had this.
Some of those memories seemed to hang in the air between them, sweet, ethereal strands stretching between his heart and Pete’s as though in an effort to twine them together forever–and then Pete coughed again, his whole body shaken with it.
“Okay.” Dale stood up and clasped his hands together as if finalizing a to-do list in his head. “Girls, can you go grab your backpacks or whatever, and pack for a few days? I’m taking you and your daddy to my house till the storm blows over.”
“You have to–” Pete paused to cough. “You have to help them.”
“You wait on the couch, then,” said Dale. “I’ll help them and then you.”
Pete seemed obedient in his silence as Dale followed Rebecca’s tugging hand to a little room at the other end of the trailer.
The room was at the north end of the trailer, so was getting the brunt of a cold wind whistling down from the mountains, which made him even more desperate to get them all out of there.
He was shown two backpacks, one that was blue with a white haired girl on it, the other that was pink with a girl with red hair on it. Disney, he suspected, but he saw that they’d not really unpacked, which meant that the little family had arrived only recently, perhaps even the night before.
Silently, he picked up both backpacks, and looked at the little girls.
“Is everything still in these?” he asked.
They nodded solemnly and silently at him, so he led them back into the living room, where he spied a hard-sided suitcase on wheels.
This suitcase was opened a little way at the top as if Pete had started digging around for something, medicine maybe, and then just stopped.
He zipped the suitcase up, and said, “I’m loading these and I’ll be right back.”
He tromped out of the trailer into the face of a hard, slanted, ice-drenched wind, and tucked the backpacks and suitcases in the truck bed where they wouldn’t fall out.
When he turned, he realized that Rebecca and Melanie had followed him outside, holding hands, two silent sentinels in the snow.
Instead of sending them back inside, because what was the point, he loaded them into the back seat of his four-door pickup and buckled them both in. They didn’t say a word, which was kind of freaking him out, but maybe the whole thing was kind of freaking them out.
“We’re going to be fine,” he said, pulling the old black and red checked blanket he kept back there over their knees.
“What about Daddy?” asked Melanie, her eyes worried.
“I’m going to get him right now,” he said. “We’ll be on our way in two minutes.”
He went back inside, where Pete was standing, wobbling as he attempted to pull on a dingy green crewneck sweater over his head.
“Sit down,” said Dale, his voice on the verge of being hard-edged, his worry and concern rolling themselves into a little storm of panic. “Shoes?”
Pete sat down on the couch, pointed at a spot by the door, where a pair of tasseled loafers rested in a small, citified heap.
Dale’s mouth opened to start a speech about how Pete should have known better, at this time of year especially, just about Christmas, than to be driving anywhere in Wyoming without good footwear.
What if his car had broken down and he needed to get out to look at the engine?
Which led Dale to question what he’d seen, or rather not seen, in the yard.
“Where’s your car?” asked Dale as he bent at Pete’s feet and gently rubbed his ankles, tugging his fancy, thin socks up all the way.
“Taxi,” said Pete, breathing hard, like he was trying to hold back a cough. “From town.”
“Did you come by bus?” asked Dale, already knowing the answer was yes. The Greyhound bus station was on the other side of the highway, and perhaps the taxi had gone by the grocery store, which might explain how Melanie and Rebecca had decided to head in that direction.
At Pete’s nod, Dale made himself stop asking questions, or even wondering about them. His job was to get the four of them back to his place before the snow really started to come down.
He’d keep his memories about him and Pete to himself, at least until Pete was better, and maybe not even then.
Pete didn’t deserve having to explain himself to Dale, especially since he was obviously on his last legs, having come to a situation where bringing his daughters to a shithole of a trailer on the outskirts of a very small, nothing-ever-happens-here town had been his only option.
Dale did his best to wrestle those tasseled shoes onto Pete’s feet. But the shoes were hopelessly misshapen, having not been stuffed with rags as they were allowed to dry.
He gave up on that, stood up, and stood close while he grabbed the wool coat from the back of the couch, and helped Pete put it on.
For good measure, he wrapped the thin blanket around Pete’s shoulders like a cape.
Then he picked Pete up in his arms, ignoring Pete’s squawk of surprise, and hauled him bodily out to the truck, buckling him in, and shutting the door.
The only reason he went back to the trailer to shut the door solidly was because it was the right thing to do.
Just because it was a shitty trailer didn’t mean that Pete would appreciate Dale mistreating his property.
And maybe Pete would want to come back and fix the place up so he could live within a ten or fifteen minute drive from Dale forever and ever.
A pipe dream. Foolish. Based on a younger man’s heart.
Based on a love grown out of innocence, so long ago that sometimes Dale felt he’d imagined it.
He needed to let go and move on, but first, he had a rescue to complete.He got into the truck, turned on the engine, and put the heat on full blast. Had he been any farther from home, he would have been quite worried about the amount of snow that had built on his windshield in the short time he’d been inside the trailer.
He was close to home, so close he could have closed his eyes and driven the distance by memory.
But as he pulled out onto the snow-covered road, he kept his eyes open, for he had a burden to carry, so precious to him that he even went slower than he normally would, just to make sure they all arrived in one piece.