Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik

local promise. Perhaps I am not entirely doomed.

39.
    M y father’s truck amidst a terrible storm. A peculiar pressure in the air. Rain buffeting the back window.
    He’s pouring his coffee into our cups, the smell of it in the closed cab. The Thermos screwed closed and laid between us.
    â€œDo you have an answer to her question?” He is scratching his beard. “What
are
you doing here without Tess?”
    I’d not been back to see my mother. I was gathering courage, or preparing an answer, or trying to put language to this strange thing I was building.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said.
    â€œWell, whatever the answer, we can’t stop visiting her because she’s cruel from time to time.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œOtherwise, why are we here? Otherwise, what’s the point?”
    I shrug.
    â€œThat’s what she’s asking you, Joey. That’s what she’s asking us both.”
    â€œAnd you have an answer?”
    â€œI told you. I’m here to protect her. I’m here to love her.”
    â€œTill death do you part.”
    I can feel his eyes on me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I say. Why can’t I help myself?
    â€œDoesn’t matter, Joey, but that’s right. Till death do us part.”
    I nod and sip my coffee and watch the waves march in one after the other and I think of Tess. I stare straight ahead and imagine her fingers tapping at the glass.
    On cue, my father asks again, “You call Tess?”
    He can’t stop himself no matter how many times, and how many ways, I tell him to shut up.
    I shake my head and laugh. He laughs too.
    â€œSorry,” he says.
    The March men, always apologizing.
    I close my eyes.
    I’m in our motel room in Cannon Beach. And here in the parking lot Tess is tapping on the glass, smiling at me through the fogged window, her hair all wet, but when I roll it down there’s only surf and wind and rain.
    â€œYou’re letting water in,” he says and I roll it back up. We go on looking out at the storm and drinking our coffee and I return to constructing this thing. Because my mother is right, of course. Forget her demeanor. And anyway what am I to expect of a homicidal maniac? Deep sympathy and great tact? So forget her coldness. It fits her now. What she is. Killer. Prisoner. And hers is a good question. Really, it is the only question. White Pine or anywhere else. Incarcerated mother, or not.
    What are you doing in this town without the girl you love? What are you doing here at all?

40.
    M y mother sitting in prison for murder, and my sister Claire having sworn off us, and I’m eating dinner with my father four times a week and seven nights a week I hear him snoring through the walls. He’s pretending to take care of me, but mostly it seems the opposite. I worry about him especially at night, and wonder how I can prop him up a bit, how I might make him stronger while every day it seems his beard goes greyer, his eyes a little duller, sinking a little deeper into his skull.
    So there’s him in my head, and my mother locked up, but above all the one thing I really care about exists as a hole in my chest the size of a fat fist. So who gives a shit about the names of the guys I was working with or the sawdust on the floor or the smell of the places I went or the beauty of the beach in the early morning? But maybe all those things matter, too. I’m just trying to give you a sense of it. Or bring a sense of it back to myself. The strangeness. Always in my head trying to work out what the fuck I was doing there, just like she’d asked.
    Say it’s a Saturday in late October. 1991. It’s busy. Two bartenders. Me and a tall guy with a beard. Maybe his name is Matt. Let’s call him Matt. Half the guys I met back then were named Matt. Who cares? So two bartenders. Me and Matt and a barback. Call him Craig. The other half were called Craig. Matts and Craigs all over the