Waiting On You (Blue Heron #3)(29)

As usual, Didi got her way.

So the letters and emails had to suffice.

Then, after seven months, word came that Dan was being transferred. Overcrowding in Illinois prisons; Dad was going to a facility in Arizona next week. Joe broke the news at dinner, and Didi’s pinched face froze even harder.

“Do you think you can take me to see him this weekend?” Lucas asked, his fork was clenched in his hand.

“You bet, sport,” his uncle said.

“We’ll see,” Didi answered. “This is not really dinner conversation, though, is it?” She inclined her head toward Bryce, who was texting someone and smiling.

“Please, Aunt Didi.” He hated calling her aunt. She didn’t deserve the title, but maybe, please God, it would soften her up.

“I said, we’ll see, Lucas.”

That meant no.

Dad was being moved on Monday. It was already Wednesday.

That night, after the family had gone upstairs and no voices drifted down through the vents, Lucas packed his cheap backpack, made a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, taking care to wipe down the counter and put the knife in the dishwasher. Left the house, closing the door silently behind him.

His plan was pretty basic: he’d get to his sister’s place and get her to borrow her friend’s car. The prison was about three hours out of Chicago. If she couldn’t take him, Tommy O’Shea’s parents might. They’d liked him well enough back in the day. Once, Lucas had intervened in a fight on Tommy’s behalf and got a black eye for his trouble. Maybe it’d be enough to get a ride. Or he’d hitchhike.

He made it out of the development and walked about a mile to the train tracks. It’d be perfect if he could hop a freighter like the hobos of yore, but the trains on this track were commuter trains and flew by at this time of night. But the tracks did lead into Chicago, so Lucas walked along them, his heart both heavy and light.

It’d be good to see Dad again. But it would be terrible to see him, too, because this would be the last time for a long time. A really long time.

Arizona...that was two days of driving, and Lucas didn’t even have a learner’s permit.

He was about two miles out of town when he looked over his shoulder.

Shit.

Bryce was following him. His cousin raised his hand and trotted to close the distance between them.

“What are you doing?” Lucas said.

“Hey! I should ask you that, right? Where are you going? You running away?”

Lucas took a breath. “I’m going to say goodbye to my dad. Don’t follow me, okay? I’ll be back in a day or so.”

“No, it’s cool! I’ll come with you, in fact.”

“Bryce, if you come with me, your mom will have the state police out looking for you. Go home, buddy.”

“Why? It’ll be fun! The two of us, together!”

“No. You can’t come.”

“Well, I’m not going back.” Bryce grinned, but there was a hardness there, the stubborn tone of a kid who was used to getting his way. “He’s my uncle. I wanna say goodbye, too.”

“Then go back home and ask your mother to take you.”

“Yeah, right. She’d never let me go to a prison.”

“Exactly. What do you think she’s gonna do when you don’t come down for breakfast?”

Bryce shrugged. In the distance, a train whistle sounded, as lonely and sad as the call of a wolf at this late hour.

Lucas turned his back and kept walking. Bryce fell in step beside him. “This’ll be great. We’ll go see Uncle Dan then maybe hitchhike back or something. Maybe we can stop at your old place and hang out.”

For a flash, Lucas could feel how good it would be to punch Bryce. Hard. Hard enough to knock him down. To tell him to get his head out of his ass, to see things from someone else’s point of view, just once, and not be such an idiot. To go home and enjoy his status as Perfect and Adored Son and not co-opt this one thing, this goodbye to his father. To acknowledge that the loss of his mother and father hurt, goddamn it. To recognize that this wasn’t some sort of cousins-ho! adventure. It was Lucas’s chance to say goodbye to his father, who’d worked so hard and been so stupid and wrong and was such a good guy even so.

“This is fun,” Bryce said now. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been out this late at night.” He smiled.

“Yeah,” Lucas said.

The train whistle sounded again, and Lucas put his foot on the rail. A faint vibration hummed through it.

In a flash, he saw how he could lose Bryce. He could cross the tracks at the last minute; Bryce wouldn’t follow him because he’d be scared of getting hurt. When they were little, he never tried the stunts Lucas could pull on his bike, wheelies and jumps and spins. He wouldn’t even dive off the dock at the lake where Joe had taken them last month.

So Lucas could sprint across the tracks, and Bryce wouldn’t follow. The train would come, and it was a long one from the sound of it; Lucas hadn’t grown up two blocks from the tracks for nothing. Then he’d run ahead as fast and far as he could, hidden by the train, and duck out of sight. Bryce would give up and go home, and Lucas could make it up to him when he got back. He just had to wait until the train got close enough, so Bryce wouldn’t dare follow.

It almost worked.