Free Sometimes the Wolf by Urban Waite Page B

from you.” He felt the words slip up over his tongue and lash out. Nothing he could do to stop them, and a desire to simply spill it all out into the night air and be done with it.
    So much hate for his father. For the last twelve years, and more, he realized, all the way back to when he was a boy and his father had brought him to see his mother in the hospital. Hours away. The clinic in Silver Lake not equipped to handle things like cancer, like people who needed to be held up on life support, wired up into the electricity while machines did the work the body no longer could.
    Next to him on the stairs, he felt his father stand. “I needed to say that to you.”
    “You’ve said it.”
    “I’ll see you inside, then.”
    Drake heard his father turn and move up the stairs, the grit working beneath his shoes on the wood. “Dad,” Drake said. “I was going to tell you later, over dinner.” Drake paused, trying to get the words right, trying to calm the dangerous beat he felt in his heart. “I’m headed into the hills tomorrow, west of the lake. We’ll be tracking that wolf. Ellie asked if you would come. I think I’d like you there as well.”
    A long silence followed. Drake picked up the empty bottle next to him and ran a fingertip over the top, finding the slight imperfection in the glass where the two edges had been sealed together in the factory. He thought about his father twenty-five years ago, his mother in the hospital bed, he thought about the years that followed. He thought about all that had happened twelve years before. He thought about the money, about Driscoll, and Gary, and his father.
    “Good,” his father said. “I’ve been meaning to get up into those hills.”
    AFTER DINNER DRAKE lay in bed next to Sheri and tried to close his eyes. The thoughts in his head going around and around without end.
    Sheri sat there with her back to the headboard. “You going to tell me what’s up?”
    “There’s nothing to tell,” Drake said. His eyes still closed and his arms crossed over his chest beneath the sheets.
    “You didn’t say much during dinner, and those questions you were asking me before, about your father and where he’d been through the day. He can’t be that bad.”
    Drake turned away, opening his eyes and staring at the wall until Sheri put out the light. She was resting with her face to him and he felt her breath on the back of his neck and her body close into his. After five minutes had passed Drake asked, “What makes you trust him so much?”
    “What makes you not trust him at all?”
    “A lot has been said about him.”
    “You’ve heard it all before,” Sheri said. “It’s not like you haven’t gotten used to the things people say.”
    “Not all of it.”
    “Well, you know him better than me,” Sheri said, sarcasm in her voice.
    Drake had his eyes open still, the dark room was coming back into focus and he saw the nightstand and the wall farther on. “What makes you so certain about him?”
    “I just feel for him,” Sheri said. “For where he’s been and what he’s had to do to get here with us. It took a lot for him to come back here after everything. To the house he used to share with your mother and you. For him to come to Silver Lake. I have sympathy for him, but I also think it takes a lot of courage.”
    Drake turned so that he could face her, hoping that she could see the smile on his face when he said, “You’ve got a soft heart, Sheri.”
    “Well, you’ve got a heart made of stone,” she said, pushing at him a little beneath the sheets, her own smile now visible.
    “He’s here because he has to be. We said we’d take care of him, didn’t we? It was one of the conditions of his release.”
    “I know he seems like a loner but he’s not really to blame for what he is. Not totally.”
    In the dim light of their bedroom Drake lay watching his wife. He didn’t know what else to say to her. The trip into the woods with Ellie was less than eight hours