“I’ve been looking all weekend,” Dana spoke into the phone. It was Sunday evening, and as usual she was speaking with her mother, Cora. “Everything’s just either too far away or in neighborhoods that you don’t want me to live alone in.”

“You’re running out of time, honey, what if you can’t find a place?”

“Actually,” Dana began, “remember Nick from college?”

“That poor boy who lost his wife, right?”

“Yeah. We spoke the other day…” Dana hesitated, not really sure how she wanted to proceed. “Um, he told me that if I wanted to take a break, you know, just get out of town for a while, I’d be welcome with him.”

“That’s nice of him. Is that back in Ohio then?”

It occurred to Dana at that precise moment that she had allowed communication with her mother to degrade too much over the years. She rose to her feet and began to pace back and forth across her bedroom. There was far too much information that Dana took for granted and simply expected her to know despite being so far out of the loop.

“I guess I never told you, mom. He actually moved to South Dakota like five years ago. Shortly after she died.”

“Poor dear. You’ve never been there, though, have you? Supposed to be beautiful country. Might just do you good.”

“No, I’ve never been. It would be really nice to visit though.”

“Well,” Cora said in that motherly tone alerting Dana to the imminent pronouncement of a life lesson. “You should go and visit. You two were thick as thieves in school. It’s amazing that you’ve stayed in touch through everything. Why on earth wouldn’t you go?”

“It’s complicated, mom.”

Dana was still ashamed of the jealousy she felt toward Rachel, and couldn’t stand to confess it to anyone. Deep down she worried that if faced with extended amounts of time alone with Nick that the guilt would destroy her. Another part of her was worried about Nick; was he still the same person she had known? Had he become a disheveled hermit, purposely avoiding humankind and hiding some morbid delusion or psychopathy. The thought itself seemed completely ridiculous to her, but she couldn’t be sure, Rachel’s death had completely blindsided him.

“Dana, do you even realize how often you just make excuses out of nothing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t find an apartment you like because you want to go see Nick. But you pretend don’t want to go so you can say that you didn’t have a choice, you couldn’t find an apartment in time.”

“Mom, that’s not true at all.”

“Manny left you in January. You have had all year to figure out your living situation, why on earth would you wait until the last minute like this?”

Dana recoiled in offense, she even pulled the phone away from her ear in order to give it a dirty look.

“Gee, sorry, mom, my life was just falling down around me, I was a little depressed for a while.”

“Dana,” Cora sighed, “it’s nothing to get upset about. I’m just trying to tell you that you’ve been this way your whole life. You aren’t aware of what motivates you half of the time.”

“My motivation is that I can’t get any jobs in L.A. if I’m in South Dakota.”

“You’ve been out there waiting tables for twelve years, darling. I’m still rooting for you, but do you honestly think taking some time to figure things out would make you miss out on your big break?”

Dana slumped down on the bed, reality had just set in.

“Nick thinks that I should try my hand at writing again. I can do that at his place, and at least have something to show for the time.”

“That sounds like a good idea.” Cora sounded pleased. “What is it that took him to South Dakota? What’s he do up there?”

“He’s a writer now. He had that consulting business in Ohio, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well, he sold it off to his employees, and just walked away with the money. He’s got a little house out in the middle of nowhere and he just writes now.”

“Good for him. Sounds like he could teach you a thing or two.”

“He says it’s a pretty nice life. He hunts and grows a lot of his own food. The house is paid off, so he doesn’t have any debt or anything. He’s got it set up where he can basically do whatever he wants and doesn’t have to worry about money because he can live off of practically nothing.”

“It sounds like he knows how to pick up the pieces and rebuild. Doesn’t that seem appropriate given your situation?”

“I get it, mom. You think I should go up there.”

Eleven hundred miles away, Nick sat in his underwear bathed in the glow of the iMac’s screen, his fingers clicking the Chiclet keys in rapid succession. His office was completely dark aside from the screen. The speakers in the corners were playing a bluegrass song dominated by a mournful fiddle in sparkling fidelity.

The clicking of the keys abruptly stopped, and Nick closed the file and put the computer to sleep. He rose to his feet and stretched his arms into the air over his head. He reached higher and higher. His back arched backwards as his heels lifted off of the wooden floor. He held the stretch for a solid three seconds in the dark room before turning towards the door.

He entered his bedroom in the darkness. The same sad fiddle was playing on that speaker as well. Nick picked up his cell phone from the bureau and using an app to control the speakers, he cast silence across the entire house.

Tristan and Isolde were already sound asleep in their beds. Bear was also presumably asleep as well in the living room. Drake had walked slowly into the darkened bedroom from an unknown spot upon hearing the speakers shut off.

Nick yawned audibly just before he climbed into the bed. He generally tended not to stay up this late, despite his nature as a night owl. The early summer mornings made it easier to keep a rigid schedule; rise early or work outside in the blistering heat. This night was an exception to the rule however. After eating dinner, inspiration had struck Nick and he had spent four hours straight at the keyboard. He not only expressed the entirety of the thought that had occurred to him without forgetting any of it, but he reckoned that he had captured well over four thousand words of premium quality. Not a bad session for a writer attempting to maintain a fifteen hundred word per day habit.

As he settled into the bed and pulled the blankets up around his shoulders, he could feel the bed shaking as Drake climbed onto it. The shaking continued for a bit until the dog collapsed in a heap. All was still. Nick, exhausted, drifted off to sleep. Before he was completely gone though, he could remember hearing the familiar sound of his old dog releasing a heavy sigh.

Next Chapter: Chapter 6