Free Reality Check (2010) by Peter Abrahams Page A

first time not as just simply home, but as the dingy dump it was. A scary idea hit him: He wouldn't be back. But that was crazy. He started for the door, realized he'd forgotten his toilet kit--toothbrush, razor, all that. And what about taking along a sandwich or two, and water?
    Five minutes later, and now fully packed, he left the apartment and went down the stairs. At the bottom he realized he hadn't thought of his bad leg, hadn't favored it at all, not the whole way down; meaning the knee wasn't so bad anymore and he was getting better. His heart lifted inside his chest; relief turned out to be a real physical feeling. He popped the trunk of his car, threw in the duffel, and thought: Low 33--winter jacket. Cody climbed back up the stairs, found the apartment door locked, reached into his pocket, and: no keys. Locked out. He'd left them inside. Step one on the journey: kind of funny.
    Cody drove out of the alley and turned onto the street, where he paused behind a car letting someone off at the Red Pony. He'd just had time to see that the someone was Mrs. Redding when the driver's door opened and Tonya came running out. Cody rolled down his window.
"Hey, Cody."
"Hey."
    "This is so weird. Clea and everything. Plus have you heard the latest?"
"About Clea?"
"Nothing new about her, not that I've heard. I'm talking about her father. He came back from the search for business or something and now he had a heart attack. They had to do one of those bypasses."
"How do you know?"
"Friend of my mom's is a nurse at Western Memorial--she thinks he'll make it." Tonya glanced into the car. He caught her smell; a very nice one. "Where you headed?" she said.
"No place special."
"Sounds good."
"Huh?"
"No place special, Cody. Got room for me?"
He almost said Huh? again. Instead, for once, he did a little better. "How's Dickie?"
"Dickie," she said, "is a dick."
Cody laughed. All his impressions of Dickie--someone he'd been dealing with since the earliest days of Pop Warner-- came snapping together into an accurate picture.
"So what's the answer?" Tonya said. "Got room for me?"
Their eyes met. Maybe hers weren't quite symmetrical, maybe her hair, cut in a lopsided way, with purple at the ends, was a little silly, but there was something about Tonya. "You're going places, Tonya." That just popped out; he was blurting all sorts of things in the past little while.
Tonya's mouth opened in surprise.
"Later," said Cody, and he drove away. He glanced back in the rearview mirror. She was giving him the finger, a smile on her face.
    Cody stopped at an ATM and took four hundred dollars from his account, the most it would give him in one day. Then he got on the interstate and headed east, away from the mountains. He'd been west, into the mountains--and even across and all the way to San Diego once, a long time ago, blue waves just at the edge of memory--but he hadn't been more than twenty miles the other way, east of Little Bend. He thought of the scene in the Lord of the Rings movie where the hobbits stop at the edge of a cornfield marking the border of the Shire. His own border was an exit in the middle of a flat nowhere: INDIAN VALLEY , 6 MILES . Cody hadn't been planning to do this, hadn't had the slightest notion, but he took the Indian Valley exit.
    Cody had been to Indian Valley twice before. The first time, with his mother, to see the farmhouse where she'd grown up, he barely remembered. The second time, to her funeral, he didn't remember much better, although by then he'd been almost eleven. He had clear memories from that year--returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown in his very first Pop Warner game--so why was his mother's funeral reduced to just a few shadows? Cody drove into Indian Valley--a crossroads with endless fields all around, now bare until spring--and parked behind the little church.
    There was no one around. Cody made his way through the cemetery. He couldn't remember the exact location of his mother's grave, but the Indian