Page 112 of Rhodes

The tires change their sound on the seams, thunk, thunk, thunk, steady as a clock. I take my phone off the console. I thumb Reeves, click call, and press the speaker button. It goes straight to voicemail again. His voice is flat, telling me to leave a message.

I hang up and toss my phone onto the passenger seat.

The lanes empty out past the airport. It's Saturday, early, and nobody is going east but trucks and men who couldn't sleep. The sun isn't all the way up yet. The misty light comes at me gray and pink through the windshield where the interstate lifts onto the long stretch through the marsh, cypress standing black in the water on both sides. I keep the needle where it is and let the mile markers come.

Then the twin spans, five and a half miles of open lake with nothing on either side of the truck, the water flat and pewter under the new light and a shrimper working out toward the north shore.

Slidell comes up off the far end of the bridge. I take the phone off my leg and call him again, but the same greeting comes after no rings.

I hang up.

The exit for the cabin road goes past on my right, and I don't even turn my head. Usually, getting off there is on autopilot.

I put the phone back on my leg and keep driving toward Bay St. Louis.

The only thing I let stay in my head is her.

I put myself back to last night, Tallulah at the counter with the paper towel bunched in her fist. She sent him an email about every single call she made. And then, after holding all of it up alone for so long, after her mother, after every one of them putting a hand on her reins, she finally cried, in my kitchen, against my shirt.

I let that stay. Everything else, I drive.

Mississippi comes, and the pines start, red in the low sun. The shoulder turns to sand as the exits get farther apart.

I take the Bay St. Louis exit. I come up their street and slow at the mailbox before turning into the drive.

There's a bike in the yard lying on its side.

I park and sit there for a minute, wondering if it's too early to show up here like this on a Saturday morning. At least the sun is up fully now. He has two little ones, so surely he's up by now.

I check my watch. It's 7:29.

When I knock on the door, Reeves opens it with a kitchen apron and no shirt. His hair is flat on one side, and he takes one look at me standing on his front porch, looking more surprised than I am that I'm here like this at this hour.

He doesn't ask.

"Come in and eat."

He turns back into the house. I follow him through the front hall and into the kitchen. It smells like batter and coffee.

Charli's at the counter in one of Reeves's shirts, and she lifts her chin at me. There's a bassinet by the window with the baby in it, still, one fist up by her ear.

"I called you twice," I say to Reeves.

"His phone's been dead since yesterday." Charli doesn't turn around. "He won't plug it in for some reason only Reeves can understand."

I don't get two steps in before Benjy comes off the couch. He hits me around the waist and climbs my legs like I'm a ladder, one bare foot on my thigh. He's like a monkey, getting an arm hooked around my neck, and pulls himself up. I grab him around the back and give him the last boost up.

"Uncle Rhodes. Uncle Rhodes. Is that your black truck? Is it a diesel? Dad's is a diesel."

"It's a diesel." I keep my arm wrapped around his back so he doesn't crack his head on the counter.

"How fast does it go?"

"Fast enough to get in trouble.”

"Have you ever broken a bone?"

"Yeah. See my pinky?" I hold out my left hand, where my pinky curves unnaturally to the left. "Never been the same since."