This is a work of fiction.
They had been on the road for forty minutes before either of them said anything worth saying.
Dale watched the interstate unspool ahead of him, yellow lines coming and going in the headlights. In the passenger seat, his son Marcus sat with one knee up against the glove box, the way he’d sat since he was twelve, earbuds in but — Dale had noticed — no music playing. The cord disappeared into his jacket pocket. Empty.
“You eat today?” Dale asked.
“Yeah.”
That was the first kind of silence. The easy kind, worn smooth by years.
The second kind came later, around the exit for Lexington, when Marcus pulled out one earbud and let it dangle. He was staring at the window, at his own faint reflection floating over the dark fields.
“I don’t know if Charlotte’s the right move,” he said.
Dale didn’t answer immediately. He’d learned — slowly, and at some cost — that his first answer was rarely his best one.
“How long have you been sitting with that?” he asked.
Marcus shrugged with one shoulder. “Couple weeks.”
“While you were packing up the apartment.”
“While I was packing up the apartment.”
The truck hummed. A billboard for a mattress store went by, enormous and lit up white against the pines.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Dale said.
“I know.”
“I mean that as a compliment to you, not laziness on my part.”
Marcus almost smiled. Dale caught it in the periphery.
They passed through a patch of fog sitting low in a hollow, and for a moment the headlights caught nothing but white. Then they were through it, and the road was clear again.
“Your grandfather told me something once,” Dale said. “He said the decisions that feel like cliffs usually turn out to be steps. And the ones that feel like nothing — like you’re just going along — those are the cliffs.”
Marcus turned that over. “So which is Charlotte?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing he never told me. You have to figure that part out yourself.”
Another mile. The radio was off. The engine was a low, steady thing under them, and outside, the dark countryside moved past like a river.
Marcus put the earbud back in, but he shifted in his seat — turned just slightly toward his father, enough that their silences were now the same silence, shared between them like something passed hand to hand in the dark.
Dale kept driving. Kept his eyes on the road. Felt, quietly, like he might have said the right thing for once.