Chapter 3
The Christmas tree is already up. Cal works in the forest service and takes pride in knowing his trees.
This year’s is a nine-footer, no bare patches, taking lots of water.
It’s strung with multicolored lights and bedecked in ornaments Danny made in school.
Danny was not a particularly artistic child, which is a polite way of saying his clay Jesus looks like sacrilege.
“Want me to get the fire going?” Cal asks. “You can tell me about your week.”
“Dad, it’s two a.m.”
“It’s never too a.m. to get a fire going!”
“Ha ha,” Danny says. “Like t-o-o. You got me there.”
“Hot cocoa?”
Danny hugs Cal again. They are exactly the same height. Danny grew early and then stopped, so they’ve been this way, exactly the same, since Danny was fifteen. “In the morning, hot cocoa by the boatload.”
“I’m gonna hold you to it!” Cal says, and he shoots Danny finger guns.
In his childhood bedroom, Danny shrugs his duffel off his shoulder.
One of his walls is covered in national park maps.
That was what Cal and Danny did every holiday—picked a new park and drove there.
The opposing wall is a collage of concert paraphernalia, hard-won because no one ever aspired to bring their world stadium tour to the fourth-largest city in Montana.
Danny worked at a coffee shop downtown all four years of high school, every moment of the summer, after school most days, scratching out his homework behind the register between customers, and with the money he saved, he drove to Boise and Denver and Seattle and Portland, stayed in shitty houses and motels with his friends, ate nothing but stale banana bread the coffee shop didn’t sell.
He has ticket stubs and concert posters from Blanket Statement, MISSOURI, Kat Gravity, the June Bugs: a map of Danny’s teenagedom.
He thought about bringing all this ephemera to his college dorm but decided it seemed too self-conscious—the armor carried by someone who was not sure enough of his own personality to let it stand without aesthetic signal.
Danny drops his backpack beside the wardrobe and sinks onto his bedspread.
The world on the other side of the window is moon bright with snow, and the six inches of air closest to the glass are sharp with cold.
Through the wall, he can hear Cal getting ready for bed.
The faucet; an electric toothbrush. Danny takes off his shoes and socks, his pants and shirt, folds everything neatly and sets it by his backpack.
He climbs under the heavy quilts in his boxers and stares up.
The ceiling is paneled in dark wood. The house looks vaguely like a hunting lodge, though Cal has never hunted anything.
Like Danny, Cal has always been vegetarian.
He holds his phone above his face for a long time, just staring at the awaiting screen, before he opens his messages with Eve. He takes a picture of the wall of music ephemera and composes a text.
Danny: I very much hope you are happily asleep right now! At my dad’s now. See you soon. I love you.
It would be ludicrous to expect her to respond immediately, and, of course, she doesn’t.
A minute later, Cal knocks, and the door creaks open.
“Hey, bud,” Cal says. “You need anything? All good?”
“All good, Dad. Thanks.”
“Okay. Hey, hey—what does the dad cow say to the baby cow?”
“What?”
“I love you to the mooooon and back.”
“That’s funny,” Danny says. “But maybe just end on moon. It’s punchier that way.”
“You got it.”
“Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, kiddo.”