Dante Bledsoe

⛓️ Day: 1 | 📅 Day of Week: Saturday | 🕐 Time: 2:18 PM | 🌤️ Weather: Cool, Overcast | 📍 Location: Bellweather Auto & Cycle, Front Lot | 🥀 Relationship: Former Lovers — Seventeen Years Apart

Three weeks out and apparently I'm qualified to rebuild a forty-year-old carburetor but not buy my own fucking lunch.

I stand beside the shop's open garage door with grease worked into the lines of my hands, staring at the glowing screen of the phone somebody insisted I needed. The restaurant's ordering app has asked me for a password twice, sent me a code I can't find, and now wants permission to know my location.

“No.”

I shove the phone into the pocket of my faded black jeans.

There's a diner six blocks away. They still understand cash.

“Taking lunch,” I call toward the garage.

I grab my leather jacket from the back of a chair and step outside.

Three weeks.

Twenty-two days of doors that open when I push them. Twenty-two nights of waking up and needing a few seconds to understand why nobody's yelling count. Twenty-two mornings of deciding what shirt to wear like that's a perfectly ordinary decision instead of something that still occasionally pisses me off with its novelty.

The parking lot is busy enough that I automatically scan it.

Two people at the gas station across the road. Woman loading groceries into an SUV. Guy smoking beside a pickup.

Then—

I stop.

No.

For one strange second, my brain refuses to cooperate.

Seventeen years should make somebody unrecognizable.

It doesn't.

You're standing near the far end of the lot.

Everything around me seems to go quiet even though I can still hear an impact wrench hammering somewhere inside the garage.

Her.

The last time I saw you without glass between us, you were sitting in a witness box.

Was there blood on Mr. Bledsoe's shirt when he arrived at your residence?

Yes.

One fucking word.

I know everything that came after it. I know you told them about the fight. I know you explained the blood. I've had seventeen years to understand exactly what the prosecutor did with your testimony.

Apparently seventeen years wasn't enough to stop hearing the yes.

My jaw tightens.

Then somebody walks up beside you.

A boy.

Teenager, really. Nearly a man.

Dark hair. Tall already. Lean.

He turns his head toward you, and something inside my chest drops so violently that for a second I genuinely can't breathe.

I've seen photographs.

Old school pictures folded into letters I pretended I didn't wait for. A gap-toothed little kid holding a baseball. A twelve-year-old with hair hanging in his eyes. The photograph from last year that I stared at until the guard told me lights out.

Pictures didn't prepare me for this.

Because photographs never showed me the way he moves.

Fuck.

My hand closes around the edge of the garage door.

Sixteen years old.

My son is sixteen years old.

And he's standing thirty feet away from me.

Someone leaving the shop notices where I'm looking, then notices who I'm looking at. Recognition moves across his face.

I'm used to that part.

Three weeks back in this town and I've learned there are only three expressions people have when they recognize Dante Bledsoe.

Fear.

Pity.

Curiosity.

I ignore him.

Emery looks toward the garage.

Toward me.

I see the exact second he recognizes me.

Of course he does.

My twenty-two-year-old face has been plastered across enough documentaries, newspaper archives, and shitty internet articles that my own son probably knew my mugshot before he knew my voice.

I should stay here.

Let you decide what happens.

Maybe go back inside.

Instead, I wipe my palms slowly against my jeans and cross the parking lot.

Each step makes the seventeen years between us feel simultaneously enormous and nonexistent.

I stop several feet away.

My eyes go to you first.

I thought I'd know what I'd say if this ever happened.

Turns out seventeen years gives a man plenty of time to rehearse conversations that become completely fucking useless when the person is actually standing there.

My gaze shifts to Emery.

Up close it's worse.

There's enough of me in his face that it feels like somebody reached backward through time and dragged part of the person I used to be into this parking lot.

My throat works once.

“Emery.”

First time I've ever said my son's name while standing in front of him.

Jesus Christ.

I look back at you.

For a moment there's anger. Then something older. Something I refuse to examine with witnesses twenty feet away.

A bitter half-smile pulls at one corner of my mouth.

“Seventeen years.”

Brilliant opening, Bledsoe.

I push a hand through the silver-streaked hair at my temple and glance between you and Emery again.

“I had about a thousand different versions of this conversation.”

My eyes settle on yours.

“Not one of them started in a fucking parking lot.”