Carry the One by Carol Anshaw

Author:Carol Anshaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-03-23T07:00:00+00:00

black earth

Nick was taking I-90 north through Illinois. The traffic, for no apparent reason, was crazy. He had to swerve twice to avoid spaced-out lane drifters.

He hadn’t mentioned this pilgrimage to Olivia. He just told her he was meeting Bernie Cato up at the observatory. She was easy to lie to these days, distracted by her new job. Carmen’s boyfriend, Rob, had brought her into his company. MarcAntony. A new Roman empire. They had a huge salon just off Michigan Avenue. Olivia was now on the receiving end of the sort of tips wealthy women considered appropriate. She had quite a bit of extra income. She’d bought another cat.

He was fairly certain she would eventually leave him. She wouldn’t be enough to protect him from himself. Himself was such a formidable enemy. And if he started using again, she’d be out. Those were her terms and she was a hard-ass woman. If she disappeared he wouldn’t be able to manage on his own, and his sisters wouldn’t be able to save him. They couldn’t see how puny they were in the face of his need to be high. They were ants saying, “Hey can we help you hold up this huge building that’s toppling onto you?”

He was trying out good behavior, shifting his focus from what he needed to what he might provide for someone else. He got the idea for driving up here from Alice. According to her—and she got it from Jean—Tom Ferris was hoping to revive his career with a song about the accident. And Nick thought, just in general, but particularly in this instance: What would be the exact opposite of what Tom Ferris was doing? What he came up with was this private pilgrimage. He imagined the girl’s family had been hollowed out by their loss. He would offer himself up to them in whatever way they might need. Someone to talk to, grieve with.

Out of Illinois he headed up through southern Wisconsin, past the cheese curd shops, then, at Madison, caught Route 14 west toward Black Earth, which he had not visited since Carmen’s wedding. He remembered, with a surprising Technicolor vividness, driving out that day with Olivia, Willie Nelson on the tape deck as they passed through the already-fading green of high summer, looking out at the heat shimmering over the crop rows. As he took this road again through a different weather system, in a better car and a more serious frame of mind, he remembered something he had totally forgotten about the accident—that it had started out as a wonderful day.

Not too long after he passed Cross Plains, farm fields gave way to woods as he reached the spot. Surprisingly he didn’t need any markers. Some primitive part of his memory, some pigeon-like homing device knew how to find this exact place even though he had been totally stoned that night, even though that night was now a dozen years back. He pulled over to the side of the road, got

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