Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon by Cameron Pierce Read Free Book Online Page B

road in an unfamiliar town. The truck was a Chevy with a good engine. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw leathery skin, wavy gray hair, and piercing blue eyes that scared even him. He did not look at himself again.
    He turned on the radio to see what kind of music he listened to.
    Old blues.
    Hellhounds and shit.
    Beside him on the bench seat, a cellphone rang. The screen said ‘Wife’ and he felt an involuntary flutter in his heart, though he could not definitively trace the sensation back to himself, Doug, who might be excited to see ‘Wife’ calling because he had never been married, only fantasized about the married life, or maybe this other person, whoever he had become, felt deep and abiding feelings for this ‘Wife.’ Whatever the source, he realized that he missed her.
    He picked up the phone and said, “Hey, honey. I’m on my way home.”
    As if this were normal.
    As if he knew where home was.
    The wife asked him to pick up something for dinner on the way home. She didn’t feel like cooking. He told her that he would stop at Los Hermanos.
    They said ‘I love you’ and they said ‘goodbye,’ but in the clipped, fast-forward way of people who are used to saying such things.
    Loveyoubye.
    When he stepped out of the truck outside the Mexican food restaurant, the heat took him by surprise. A tumbleweed rolled into traffic. On the other side of the four lane street, a kit fox stared at him from a field that had recently been razed to make way for a new housing development. The air was the color of Earl Grey tea. It smelled like cow shit and exhaust fumes. He went inside the restaurant and tried not to think about where he was, let alone why. He ordered some of his favorite dishes. He ordered some of his wife’s favorite dishes. He instinctively went to order some of his son’s favorites but stopped himself, found an absence in his chest that resided where his son used to be. My son is gone , he told himself, knowing how foolish it was, knowing he had never had a son. He ordered enough food so that he and his wife could take the leftovers to work tomorrow.
    The drive home was uneventful except that he got stuck in traffic. He sat there wondering what a man like himself did in the evenings after work. Did he watch television with his wife? Did he go fishing, like he did in his real life? Did he go out to bars and drink beer and play pool with friends? With limited time and money, there were only so many ways a man could occupy his evening hours. He had never conceived of an evening that did not involve fishing. He recalled the pain he’d felt just before ending up here, and it was almost enough to bring it all back.
    I’m a different man now , he thought. Just go with it .
    Eventually he pulled into the driveway of a ranch-style home in a suburban housing community named Pheasant Creek or Eagle Springs or some shit like that.
    He brought the brown bag holding the Mexican food inside. In the living room, his wife sat on the couch with a laptop on her lap. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. She appeared to be playing Spider Solitaire, but he thought he’d detected the sudden closure of a browser window as he kissed her. He mined his emotional and experiential database and decided that he trusted her. She had never given him any reason not to.
    “Come eat,” he said.
    On the walls of the living room were photos of a young boy who shared the steely blue eyes he’d seen when he looked at himself in the rearview mirror.
    My son is gone .
    Certain street and business signs had looked blurry to him as he drove home. At first he thought something must be wrong with his vision. Sunspots, maybe. After all, he was not used to such a bright place. Then he realized what it was. The name of the town. Whatever brought him here was obscuring from him the name of the town. Wherever it appeared, he saw a blur. He imagined that if he heard someone speak the name, he would hear a blur as well.
    The fate of