Chapter 1 #3
“There are other ones but they all surround certain death. Also, it’s not just about a bar.
I mean that Kolter, my boyfriend, wouldn’t only be mad about me coming here and drinking.
He cares if I drink at any time. He gets mad about a lot of stuff.
” I sighed. That had been a problem tonight, for example.
I had asked him about the water bill, which I shouldn’t have done.
Another thing he didn’t like was my questions.
Nolan seemed to take that in.
“Do you have a girlfriend? Or a wife?” I added. I wouldn’t have wanted that woman to get upset that I was in a bar with him, but if there was someone waiting for him, then he could call her for a ride.
“I was engaged.”
“Really?” I got excited, because here was the thing: I thought it seemed so cool to be engaged.
There was the whole commitment aspect which did appeal but mostly, I just loved the word.
Didn’t it sound classy somehow? Like you’d be wearing beautiful clothes—a long, flowy dress, maybe—and you’d be standing in a flower-covered field.
And you’d have a sparkling ring that you would take off and drop into a little dish next to your bed when you put on expensive lotion.
But then I realized that he had said “was,” so it was over. “What happened?” I asked. “Did you break it off?” That also sounded classy to me, classy but unfortunate.
“She did,” he told me. “She broke it off.”
His relationship issues were a shame, for a few reasons. First, they probably made him sad (break-ups usually did, and ending an engagement would have been worse), and second, there was no woman to call for help right now.
The waitress brought our drinks and he picked his up and knocked it back. Completely. He drank a glass of whiskey like it was a shot, and I stared. “Was that a good idea?” I questioned.
“No. No, it wasn’t.” He put his face in his hands.
“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong? What’s going on?” I asked. “Did you just end your engagement? Are you still pining after her years later? Or are you losing it about something else?”
“It’s something else,” he told me, and I waited instead of jumping in with all the questions I had.
“It’s everything. I have no idea where I had told that driver to take me tonight.
I remember being in a car but the next thing I knew, he was saying that the ride had just shown up as canceled on his app.
He said that if I wanted to go any further, I would have to pay him directly, and then I realized that I didn’t have my phone and I didn’t have my wallet.
I started walking.” He looked at his empty glass and directed his next question to it. “What am I doing?”
I was the one who answered. “I don’t know,” I said. “So, you don’t have your phone, either? How are you going to get home?”
“I’m not sure.” The giant drink had put more color into his face, which made sense to me. Didn’t dogs carry whiskey in mountain rescues? But I also knew that he didn’t need any more alcohol. I thought for a moment. “Do you have money at your house?” I asked, and he also had to consider.
“Cash? Why? Are you thinking about robbing me?”
“No, and I wouldn’t have told anyone if you had admitted to keeping a big stash, either. I was thinking that I could drive you and when we got there, you could pay me…oh, no.” I had just gotten a text. Then I got another one.
“What’s wrong?”
Kolter. “My boyfriend woke up,” I said. “He woke up and wants to know why I’m at Roy’s Tavern right now.”
“You can explain what happened,” Nolan suggested.
“That I picked up a stranger on the side of the road, drove him to a bar, and now we’re drinking together?” That didn’t seem like a good plan at all. “I better leave,” I said, standing up quickly. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Why do you care?”
It was a good question. I guzzled my soda like he had done with his whiskey, because it was a shame to waste it. “Thank you for this, Nolan. Bye.”
He was staring at his empty glass and I wasn’t sure that he’d heard me, but I had to go.
I ran to my car but it was too little, too late.
I had been thinking those things about the Constitution, but what did some olden-times parchment matter when my present-day boyfriend was at home with the potential to wake up and look for me? Which he had done!
And when I got back there, things with Kolter went as badly as I had expected. I apologized but I also put myself in his shoes and knew that I would have been very upset if he’d gone out with another woman, although I wouldn’t have reacted in the same way.
This situation wouldn’t happen to him, though, because he never would have stopped to help someone like I had done.
It wasn’t something that I was ever going to do again.
First, it wasn’t likely that I would encounter another half-frozen man walking along a lonely country road, and if I did…
.well, now I had proof of my boyfriend’s reaction to the situation.
He wasn’t able to accept that I was telling the truth and I had no way of convincing him.
I thought that maybe, if I’d known Nolan’s last name, I might have tried to find him to ask him to back me up, to make assurances that nothing sexy had happened.
It had been the farthest thing from our minds!
Except I had noticed that he was very good-looking.
He had carried that off despite the snow melt on his thick hair, and despite how his blue-grey eyes were very bloodshot.
But those thoughts about his appearance had been secondary to the other stuff that was going on, like how he’d been lost and maybe dying.
And I didn’t know his last name because I really didn’t know anything about him, besides that he’d been engaged, wore a nice suit, and wasn’t careful with his belongings.
It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Kolter wasn’t interested in hearing an explanation, and it did sound so dumb when I tried to say that I had only gone to a bar because of inalienable rights and the pursuit of happiness.
Those things might not have been the Constitution anyway.
I hadn’t learned about sublimation and I didn’t remember the important historical documents very well, either.
I hadn’t actually done very much in my years at school.
Weeks later, things had blown over (as they usually did).
I had mostly forgotten that Nolan guy, although I did sometimes think about him and wonder if he’d made it home all right.
After I got my phone back, I looked for news reports to see if someone with his name had been found frozen in the woods.
I also searched around local sites for information about an unidentified dead man and I didn’t find anything, but maybe he didn’t have dental records either?
Also, this area did remind me of where I’d grown up, in that there was a lot of land with no one on it.
Back home, we didn’t have all the forests that were around here, but you could get the same feeling of being the last person on Earth.
You could disappear just as easily, and no one would ever notice.
When I thought back about him, though, I realized that he didn’t seem like the type who might disappear without someone sitting up and asking what had happened.
A person with his haircut was keeping it up.
His stylist might wonder, “Where has Nolan gone? He’s usually in here at least every three weeks.
” And a person who got his hair cut so often probably had other routines, like picking up suits from the dry cleaner’s or getting groceries delivered.
He probably went to the dentist on a regular basis, too.
I wondered if he had a family. Were there people besides the ex-fiancée, people he loved and who would have been sad if he had frozen in the woods?
Were there people he texted with and updated on his life?
Did they know that he was doing things like drinking so much that he passed out in a car in the actual middle of nowhere, with no way to get back home?
But he had said that even if he’d had his phone, he had no one to call.
I also looked at the house at the address he’d given me.
It was so pretty in the pictures, pretty and very large, and the estimates about how much it was worth made my eyes widen and I may even have whistled.
Someone sitting on all that money should have had plenty of people to keep track of him.
But if I hadn’t driven past him that night, he could have lain down in the snow and that would have been the end of the story.
It was the end of my story with him, anyway. Nnnn-ooo-lll-aaa-nnn No-Name was a strange little flash, interesting and different but quickly disappearing. Kind of like a shooting star.
Meanwhile, I was here on the ground. But I did look up sometimes.