WILL TRASK

CHAPTER 1

He had to get out of here. Out to the woods. Or at least far enough away from town and the campus to be driving one of the twisty Coast Range roads where he could rest his eyes on a green, sweeping slope of young Doug fir.

He pulled the truck into his own driveway just long enough to check his watch. Three minutes—that’s all it took from his son’s freshman dorm to the house.

Some launch.

He backed the truck out, cranked the wheel and headed west.

Scary, never knowing what the blindsiding trigger would be. Sheets, for God’s sake. The roommate’s mom wincing at the heap of fresh-washed ones he and Gar had brought from home and tossed onto the bare mattress. The intimacy of her chiding. Didn’t he know they were supposed to buy new, extra long dorm sheets? She seriously doubted these would fit.

Sorry, mouthed the other dad.

But Will didn’t mind the guy’s wife. He only minded—felt wounded—that it wasn’t his own wife here to point out how he’d blown it. Suddenly shaky, he’d lowered himself to the edge of the bed, catching Gar’s distress from the corner of his eye. Easier, he sometimes thought, if he and Shelley had produced your standard-issue, oblivious teenager for a firstborn. But no, they got Garland William Trask, a son to watch him with nervous concern, understanding that of course it wasn’t about the sheets.

“I’m good, Dad,” Gar’d had the presence to say, a clap to Will’s shoulder. “You can go.”

And unlike the other parents lingering in the hallways, reluctant to leave, Will instantly seized this reprieve, jumped up and beat it the hell out of there, heart pounding.

But then, in the parking lot, he ran into Bridget Garland, delivering her daughter, Gar’s cousin Charlotte. Hey, it was Bridget, for cryin’ out loud, his fellow Garland in-law. No way could he not offer to help. And no, he wasn’t going to embarrass her by bringing up the obvious, like why wasn’t her useless husband here to do the honors for his only child?

Doubling back into the dorm with these two, it was the strangest thing how, when the elevator doors opened onto the girls’ floor, the fruity scents of whatever they were all shampooing into their flowing hair made him feel he’d been exported to some exotic land. Surrounded by twittering young female energy, he became a different guy. Nothing on this wing to be sad about, nobody missing. His brawn was appreciated, and an assigned job calmed his heart-rate. All he had to do was cheerfully muscle up to McNary’s fifth floor the appalling amount of stuff Charlotte seemed to think she needed.

Wait. Was he supposed to be getting Gar a mini-fridge?

Boy, had it ever dragged him back, being on the Oregon State campus. To think his boy was now at the very point in his life Will had been when he’d first seen Gar’s future mother walking across the quad. From that moment he’d been a goner, searching every crowd for her strawberry blond hair, that shy, flashing smile. He took to placing himself along her usual routes, much like stalking a deer, and if a guy admitted to doing that these days, he would get called a stalker, but back then it felt perfectly innocent. Hey, he was the victim. Just the sound of her sweet, flutey voice rendered him dumb and helpless.

One day in the Memorial Union he pointed her out to his roommate, who just laughed. “Don’t you know that’s Shelley Garland? As in Garland Forests? As in, rich daddy?”

“Oh, shit.” As in the Garland Grant which was paying Will’s full tuition to OSU, thanks to him graduating from Eden Mills High. He knew all about this wealthy family setting up funds to help the children of folks employed in the timber industry. Fine. Real nice of them. But the thought of their opinion on the son of a logger falling for their pretty daughter…whew.

Well, too late. He was like a big old cutthroat trout, already hooked, wildly flipping on the line. Not a damned thing he could do about it.

Heritage Realty occupied a large lot out on the highway where Corvallis ran into Eden Mills, pretty much marking the place where the beginning-to-fade Obama bumper stickers became the half-peeled–off endorsements for McCain.

Today, Will blew right by the office he kept at Heritage and, at the end of the business strip, took the left fork out the Alsea Highway, passing that wedding venue they were now calling Castle Glen, the one he’d sold. How many brides standing there under the trees along Hopestill Creek knew there was a rusting mound of old logging equipment piled up behind the nearby fence?

Into the hills, he floored it. Pathetic, he sometimes thought, how easily he found excuses to hit the road for the solace of Coast Range green. Didn’t at least one of his management clients need some forest tract checked? Whenever he drove, he kept an eye on the growth of all the different timber stands, scanning the western sky for incoming weather, the open meadows for wildlife. He could spot a coyote trotting across a grassy stretch while taking a tight curve at forty-five miles an hour. He noted every orange LOG TRUCK warning sign parked along the shoulder. He’d usually have a pretty good guess as to where the loaded trucks were heading, and how much per board foot those mills were currently paying out as well.

Today he made the turnoff for Mary’s Peak before the guilt got him and he stopped the truck. Sat there a minute, turned it around. Yeah, he wanted to keep driving forever. Just…away. But, come on, he couldn’t avoid his own place indefinitely. He did still have another kid under that roof.

The house seemed even emptier than usual. Funny. It’s not like Gar and Cody hung around much these days anyway. He’d been suspecting they had friends with homes more welcoming, mothers around baking cookies or something, although Gar once tried to set him straight on this. “Everything isn’t about Mom not being here, Dad. People just like Nick’s because the basement has an outside entrance and we don’t have to see his parents at all.”

Nice. These were the kids who’d clamored for his attention when they were little, boys who loved nothing better than doing a backyard building project with him, or being taken on a fishing trip. Oh, sure, he’d heard the rumors—teenagers don’t like to spend time with their parents. But that wasn’t supposed to apply to him. Not after what the three of them had been through together since Shelley’s death.

He opened a beer and sprawled on the sofa opposite the empty fireplace, the painting hanging over it: Castle Rock by Manuel Valencia, 1886.

Four years ago, he’d known nothing about art except that Loren Caldwell, one of his wealthy clients, had, at the urging of his son’s gay partner, invested in an abstract painting. When Will came in with an offer on one of his timber tracts, the man hit the ceiling. “A lousy million two?” He thrust a finger at the framed canvas of dribbles over his desk. “That’s less than I paid for that damned thing hanging there!” Will wasn’t sure what this proved, except that the world of art was a mysterious place, with methods for measuring value nothing like the cut and dried specifications for determining the value of a load of logs at a given point in time.

He stumbled into collecting after the accident. Unable to sleep, he’d sit in the cold glow of the computer screen, aimlessly searching. For what? He didn’t know. He looked at real estate listings for timbered acreages. He figured out the program that sent him flying over the rivers and hills, checking out the topography of every wilderness area he’d hiked, every river he’d fished, every ravine he’d inched up, dragging his crossbow. The grids and lines left him feeling hollow, though. Nothing in those engineered renderings gave the feeling of anything.

One night he Googled “Castle Rock,” the famous monolith on the Columbia, remembering the trip he and Shelley had taken up to The Gorge spring break their junior year when everybody else was heading down for that drunken orgy of a house boat float at Lake Shasta. It was on this trip that somehow, it had seemed clear to both of them that they were in love and now, before them, lay only their bright future. They were sitting on a picnic table bench, leaning back against the table itself, taking in the view of the rock on the north side of the river, and Will had his arm around her.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

In the next beat of silence he berated himself. Idiot. Should have done his homework, had the ring in his pocket. His roommate warned him girls expected you to make it special. Now he’d probably gone and blown it. And he just didn’t want to have to do this. Try to figure women out, learn the right way to propose. He wanted to declare the hunt over. Turn in his tags on this girl and get on with it.

But then she said of course she’d marry him, and few moments in his life had ever felt so clear, so sure as this one, as they agreed they would, as Will thought of it, tackle life together.

So this guy—this Manuel Valencia—must have propped...